In gauging the health of state economies, arguably the two most important series to track are employment and output. While employment by state is available about three weeks after the end of a month, data on output, as measured by Gross State Product (GSP), are only available annually and with a...

Real average U.S. per capita personal income growth over the last 65 years exceeded a remarkable 400 percent. Also notable over this period is that the stark income differences across states have narrowed considerably: In 1939 the highest income state's per capita personal income was 4.5 times...

We propose a set of consistency conditions that frontier efficiency measures should meet to be most useful for regulatory analysis or other purposes. The efficiency estimates should be consistent in their efficiency levels, rankings, and identification of best and worst firms, consistent over...

In the past decade, the US economy has witnessed a tremendous surge in the usage of electronic payment processing services and an increased importance of the firms that provide these services. The payments industry has also undergone changes in cost structure with the introduction of new...

Because the automated clearinghouse (ACH) has been found to have lower social costs than paper checks, the Federal Reserve has been promoting more widespread use of ACH by lowering ACH processing fees. In this paper we have obtained the first numerical estimates of ACH demand elasticities, a...

This paper uses a stochastic cost frontier to examine the scale economies, cost efficiencies, and technological change of three payment instruments (check, ACH, and Fedwire processing) provided by the Federal Reserve over the period 1990-1994. We find evidence of substantial scale economies and...