Check 21 legislation has enabled the check clearing system to transform from paper to electronics, and much more rapidly than some had predicted. As a result of competition with other payment methods, check use has been declining since the mid-1990s, but because of the rapid adoption of...

This paper uses a stochastic cost frontier to examine the scale economies, cost efficiencies, and technological change of three payments instruments--check, automated clearinghouse (ACH) transfers, and Fedwire processing--provided by the Federal Reserve over the period 1990-94. We find evidence...

The death of paper checks has been predicted since the 1960s, but only recently has their use begun to decline. The end may be near, though, as two forces accelerate the trend away from checks: the growing acceptance of electronic payment instruments and the passage of legislation designed to...