The U.S. banking industry is steadily increasing its reliance on nontraditional business activities that generate fee income, trading revenue, and other types of noninterest income. This paper assesses potential diversification benefits from this shift. At the aggregate level, declining...

We examine the diffusion of real-time gross settlement (RTGS) technology across all 174 central banks. RTGS reduces settlement risk and facilitates financial innovation in the settlement of foreign exchange trades. In 1985, only three central banks had implemented RTGS systems, and by year-end...

The perceptions of a central bank's inflation aversion may reflect institutional structure or, more dynamically, the history of its policy decisions. In this paper, we present a novel empirical framework that uses high-frequency data to test for persistent variation in market perceptions of...

This paper considers the welfare effect of introducing a liquidity-saving mechanism (LSM) in a real-time gross settlement (RTGS) payment system. We study the planner's problem to get a better understanding of the economic role of an LSM and find that an LSM can achieve the planner's allocation...

Granting central banks independence from short-term political control is widely assumed to decrease inflation by increasing the credibility of commitments to price stability. This paper analyzes public- and private-sector behavior in a sample of seventeen OECD countries for evidence of...

The U.S. banking industry is experiencing a renewed focus on retail banking, a trend often attributed to the stability and profitability of retail activities. This paper examines the impact of banks' retail intensity on performance from 1997 to 2004 by developing three complementary definitions...

As the U.S. banking industry continuously evolves, changes in industry composition have a direct impact on the aggregate performance of the industry. This paper presents a new decomposition framework for commercial banks and shows that both firm-level changes and dynamic reallocation...

In this paper, we argue that the observed difference in the cost of intraday and overnight liquidity is part of an optimal payments system design. In our environment, the interest charged on overnight liquidity affects output, while the cost of intraday liquidity only affects the distribution of...

This paper estimates a small open-economy dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model, specified along the lines of Galí and Monacelli (2005) and Lubik and Schorfheide (2007), using Chilean data for the full inflation-targeting period of 1999 to 2007. We study the specification of the...

This paper revisits the hypothesis that changes in inventory management were an important contributor to volatility reductions during the Great Moderation. It documents how changes in inventory behavior contributed to the stabilization of the U.S. economy within the durable goods sector, in...