We show how the interbank payment system can become illiquid following wide-scale disruptions. Two forces are at play in such disruptions—operational problems and changes in participants’ behavior. We model the interbank payment system as an n-player game and utilize the concept of a...

Recently, economists have argued that a bank's importance within the financial system depends not only on its individual characteristics but also on its position within the banking network. A bank is deemed to be 'central' if, based on our network analysis, it is predicted to hold the most...

The recent turmoil in global financial markets underscores the importance of the federal funds market as a means of distributing liquidity throughout the financial system and a tool for implementing monetary policy. In this paper, we explore the network topology of the federal funds market. We...

The Federal Home Loan Bank (FHLB) System is a large, complex, and understudied government-sponsored liquidity facility that currently has more than $1 trillion in secured loans outstanding, mostly to commercial banks and thrifts. In this paper, we document the significant role played by the FHLB...

To combat the financial crisis that intensified in the fall of 2008, the Federal Reserve injected a substantial amount of liquidity into the banking system. The resulting increase in reserve balances exerted downward price pressure in the federal funds market, and the effective federal funds...

We use an information-theoretic approach to describe changes in lending relationships between federal funds market participants around the time of the Lehman Brothers failure. Unlike previous work that conducts maximum-likelihood estimation on undirected networks, our analysis distinguishes...

The paper analyses the severity of gridlocks in interbank payment systems operating on a real time basis and evaluates by means of simulations the merits of a gridlock resolution algorithm.Data used in the simulations consist of actual payments settled in the Danish and Finnish RTGS systems.The...

[...]This article develops a stylized game-theoretical model toanalyze banks’ intraday liquidity management behavior in anRTGS environment. It analyzes the strategic incentives under Envision an economy with two identical banks using an RTGSsystem operated by the central bank to settle...

Globalization and technological innovation are two of themost pervasive forces affecting the financial system andits infrastructure. Perhaps nowhere are these trends moreapparent than in the internationalization and automation ofpayments. The evolving landscape is most obvious in retailpayments...