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Working Paper
Faster Payments : Market Structure and Policy Considerations
The U.S. payments industry is in the process of developing ubiquitous, safe, faster electronic solutions for making a broad variety of business and personal payments. How this market for faster payments will evolve will be shaped by a range of economic forces, such as economies of scale and scope, network effects, switching costs, and product differentiation. Emerging technologies could alter these forces and lead to new organizational arrangements or market structures that are different from those in legacy payment markets to date. In light of this uncertainty, this paper examines three ...
Journal Article
The Financial Stability Implications of Digital Assets
Financial activity associated with digital assets has grown rapidly, raising concerns about financial stability risks. This article presents an overview of these risks, adapting the Federal Reserve’s framework for monitoring financial stability in the traditional financial system. The overview reveals that the observed fragility of digital assets is associated with several financial vulnerabilities: valuation pressures of crypto assets, funding risk in most crypto sectors, the widespread use of leverage, and a highly interconnected crypto ecosystem. However, to date, these vulnerabilities ...
Working Paper
Racial Unemployment Gaps and the Disparate Impact of the Inflation Tax
We study the nonlinearities present in a standard monetary labor search model modified to have two groups of workers facing exogenous differences in the job finding and separation rates. We use our setting to study the racial unemployment gap between Black and white workers in the United States. A calibrated version of the model is able to replicate the difference between the two groups both in the level and volatility of unemployment. We show that the racial unemployment gap rises during downturns, and that its reaction to shocks is state-dependent. In particular, following a negative ...
Working Paper
Nonlinear Unemployment Effects of the Inflation Tax
We argue that long-run inflation has nonlinear and state-dependent effects on unemployment, output, and welfare. Using panel data from the OECD, we document three correlations. First, there is a positive long-run relationship between anticipated inflation and unemployment. Second, there is also a positive correlation between anticipated inflation and unemployment volatility. Third, the long-run inflation-unemployment relationship is not only positive, but also stronger when unemployment is higher. We show that these correlations arise in a standard monetary search model with two shocks – ...
Discussion Paper
Federal Funds Rate Control with Voluntary Reserve Targets
This note describes a framework for implementing monetary policy, dubbed a voluntary reserve targets framework, that could reintroduce significant margins in the federal funds market, reviving the market no matter the aggregate quantity of reserves, while simultaneously limiting the volatility of rates.
Working Paper
Deadlines and Matching
Deadlines and fixed end dates are pervasive in matching markets including school choice, the market for new graduates, and even financial markets such as the market for federal funds. Deadlines drive fundamental non-stationarity and complexity in behavior, generating significant departures from the steady-state equilibria usually studied in the search and matching literature. I consider a two-sided matching market with search frictions where vertically differentiated agents attempt to form bilateral matches before a deadline. I give conditions for existence and uniqueness of equilibria, and ...
Working Paper
A Simple Model of Voluntary Reserve Targets with Tolerance Bands
This note presents a simplifed version of the model of voluntary reserve targets (VRT) developed in Baughman and Carapella (forthcoming), with a Walrasian interbank market. First, the model makes transparent the role of target setting in controlling the market rate. Second, the simplicity of the model allows for an analysis of the interaction between VRT and tolerance bands, which are a common tool for controlling rate variability. We find that the persistent overshooting of interbank rates observed during the Bank of England's experiment with VRT may derive from the interaction between ...
Working Paper
The Financial Stability Implications of Digital Assets
The value of assets in the digital ecosystem has grown rapidly, amid periods of high volatility. Does the digital financial system create new potential challenges to financial stability? This paper explores this question using the Federal Reserve’s framework for analyzing vulnerabilities in the traditional financial system. The digital asset ecosystem has recently proven itself highly fragile. However adverse digital asset markets shocks have had limited spillovers to the traditional financial system. Currently, the digital asset ecosystem does not provide significant financial services ...
Working Paper
Global Demand for Basket-Backed Stablecoins
We develop a model where persistent trade shocks create demand for a basket- backed stablecoin, such as Mark Carney's "synthetic hegemonic currency" or Facebook's recent proposal for Libra. In numerical simulations, we find four main results. First, because of general equilibrium effects of the basket currency on the volatility of currency values, overall demand for that currency is small. Second, despite scant holdings of the basket, its global reach may contribute to substantial increases in welfare if the basket is widely accepted, allowing it to complement holdings of sovereign ...
Discussion Paper
The stable in stablecoins
Stablecoins have garnered much attention as a key part of the emerging decentralized finance (or "DeFi") ecosystem, and as a potential way to pay for goods and services. Stablecoins facilitate trades on crypto exchanges, serve as the underlying asset for many crypto loans, and allow market participants to avoid inefficiencies stemming from converting back to fiat currency for crypto trades.