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Journal Article
Formulating the imputed cost of equity capital for priced services at Federal Reserve banks
This paper was presented at the conference "Economic Statistics: New Needs for the Twenty-First Century," cosponsored by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the Conference on Research in Income and Wealth, and the National Association for Business Economics, July 11, 2002. According to the 1980 Monetary Control Act, the Federal Reserve Banks must establish fees for their priced services to recover all operating costs as well as the imputed costs of capital and taxes that would be incurred by a profit-making firm. Since 2002, the Federal Reserve has made fundamental changes to the ...
Journal Article
Central banking and the economics of information
This article concerns the potential relevance of information technology to three aspects of central banking: setting the objectives of monetary policy, ensuring the integrity and security of financial system infrastructure, and maintaining the transparency of decision-making. Regarding integrity and security of infrastructure, a revised role for central banks may be appropriate. However, recent innovations in technology and advances in learning confirm the wisdom of central banks' efforts to control inflation and maintain their own transparency.
Working Paper
Will the new $100 bill decrease counterfeiting?
A current U.S. policy is to introduce a new style of currency that is harder to counterfeit, but not immediately to withdraw from circulation all of the old-style currency. This policy is analyzed in a random-matching model of money, and its potential to decrease counterfeiting in the long run is shown. For various parameters of the model, three types of equilibria are found to occur. In only one does counterfeiting continue at its initial high level. In the other two, both genuine and counterfeit old-style money go out of circulation - immediately in one and gradually in the other. There are ...
Working Paper
Price level uniformity in a random matching model with perfectly patient traders
This paper shows that one of the defining features of Walrasian equilibrium---law of one price---characterizes equilibrium in a non-Walrasian environment of (1) random trade matching without double coincidence of wants, and (2) strategic, price-setting conduct. Money is modeled as perfectly divisible and there is no constraint on agents' money inventories. In such an environment with discounting, the endogenous heterogeneity of money balances among agents implies differences in marginal valuation of money between distinct pairs of traders, which raises the question whether decentralized trade ...
Journal Article
Diamond and Dybvig's classic theory of financial intermediation : what's missing?
The article shows that in a finite-trader version of the Diamond and Dybvig model (1983), the ex ante efficient allocation can be implemented as a unique equilibrium. This is so even in the presence of the sequential service constraint, as emphasized by Wallace (1988), whereby the bank must solve a sequence of maximization problems as depositors contact it at different times. A three-trader example with constant relative risk-aversion utility is used in order to illustrate clearly the requirements that the sequential service constraint imposes on implementation.
Journal Article
Electronic bill presentment and payment--is it just a click away?
This article addresses the following questions about electronic presentment and payment (EBPP) in the business-to-consumer marketplace: Why aren't electronically presented bills always paid electronically? And, if EBPP does aid in the migration to fully electronic end-to-end payment, what are the barriers to its adoption.
Journal Article
Thoughts on the Fed's role in the payment system
This essay concerns how the Federal Reserve?s role as a payment services provider can best be aligned with its broad mission to foster the integrity, efficiency, and accessibility of the U.S. payments system. A recommended strategy involves specialization in providing services where the central bank has a comparative advantage?notably, services directly related to providing a comprehensive, secure system of accounts for interbank settlement and potentially some additional services justified by economies of scope. If markets for other payment services evolve as expected, the recommended ...
Journal Article
Economic perspective on the political history of the Second Bank of the United States
The Second Bank of the United States was an institution of first-rank importance, both politically and economically, during the early nineteenth century. This article uses recent contributions to theory on industrial organization and monetary economics to argue tentatively that conflict between debtors and creditors may have played a larger role in the bank's fortunes than previously thought.
Working Paper
Implementing efficient allocations in a model of financial intermediation
In a finite-trader version of the Diamond-Dybvig (1983) model, the symmetric, ex-ante efficient allocation is implementable by a direct mechanism (i.e., each trader announces the type of his own ex-post preference) in which truthful revelation is the strictly dominant strategy for each trader. When the model is modified by formalizing the sequential-service constraint (cf. Wallace, 1988), the truth-telling equilibrium implements the symmetric, ex-ante efficient allocation with respect to iterated elimination of strictly dominated strategies.
Working Paper
Three contributions to the theory of decision under uncertainty
An intuitively natural consistency condition for contingent plans is necessary and sufficient for a contingent plan to be rationalized by maximization of conditional expected utility. One alternative theory of choice under uncertainty, the weighted-utility theory developed by Chew Soo Hong (1983) does not entail that contingent plans will generally satisfy this condition. Another alternative theory, the minimax theory as formulated by Savage (1972), does entail the consistency condition (at least for singleton-valued plans). ; Earlier title: Bayes contingent plans