On April 8-9, 2010, the Payment Cards Center of the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia hosted a conference that brought together leaders in the prepaid card industry, regulators, consumer groups, law enforcement agents, and industry researchers to discuss the economics of prepaid cards and the...

Each year, millions of financially distressed consumers in the U.S. face a difficult choice among the debt relief options available to them. This paper describes the options available to borrowers who seek assistance in managing their debts and discusses the information and incentive problems...

Several of the nation’s largest payment-card-issuing banks are working with public transit agencies to enable consumers to pay fares by using payment cards, and more such partnerships may be on the horizon. On April 23, 2009, the Payment Cards Center of the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia...

The authors examine portage sites in the U.S. South, Mid-Atlantic, and Midwest, including those on the fall line, a geomorphological feature in the southeastern U.S. marking the final rapids on rivers before the ocean. Historically, waterborne transport of goods required portage around the falls...

The authors study a dynamic, decentralized lemons market with one-time entry and characterize its set of non-stationary equilibria. This framework offers a theory of how a market suffering from adverse selection recovers over time endogenously; given an initial fraction of lemons, the model...

This paper estimates the value of the too-big-to-fail (TBTF) subsidy. Using data from the merger boom of 1991-2004, the authors find that banking organizations were willing to pay an added premium for mergers that would put them over the asset sizes that are commonly viewed as the thresholds for...

The value chain for network-branded prepaid cards involves more parties than those commonly present in credit- or debit-card issuing arrangements: the merchant acquirer, processors, a payment network, and a card-issuing bank. These additional participants may include a program manager, a...

This paper has been superseded by WP 15-03. The authors study the location and productivity of more than 1,000 research and development (R&D) labs located in the Northeast corridor of the U.S. Using a variety of spatial econometric techniques, they find that these labs are substantially more...

The authors analyze the effects of government spending cuts on economic activity in an environment of severe fiscal strain, as reflected by a sizeable risk premium on government debt. Specifically, they consider a "sovereign risk channel," through which sovereign default risk spills over to the...

Two often-divergent U.S. GDP estimates are available, a widely-used expenditure-side version GDPE, and a much less widely-used income-side version GDI . The authors propose and explore a "forecast combination" approach to combining them. They then put the theory to work, producing a superior...