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Working Paper
Imperfect monitoring and the discounting of inside money
One of the fundamental questions concerning inside money is whether its issuers should be regulated and how. This paper evaluates the efficiency of one prevalent regulatory recommendation -- a requirement that private issuers redeem inside money on demand at par -- in a random-matching model of money where the issuers of inside money are only imperfectly monitored. I find that for sufficiently imperfect monitoring, a par redemption requirement leads to lower social welfare than if private money were redeemed at a discount. A central message of the paper is that if inside money and outside ...
Working Paper
Risk and concentration in payment and securities settlement systems
Large value payment and securities settlement systems are important components of an economy's financial system. Many such systems are operated by central banks and are liquidity intensive. Central banks often provide inexpensive liquidity to facilitate settlement. This leads to a number of policy questions about the provision of such liquidity. To answer these questions, central banks need to understand what factors influence the timing of settlement. This paper offers a model to better understand intraday patterns of settlement and identifies three factors that influence the timing of ...
Working Paper
Repos, fire sales, and bankruptcy policy
The events from the 2007?09 financial crisis have raised concerns that the failure of large financial institutions can lead to destabilizing fire sales of assets. The risk of fire sales is related to exemptions from bankruptcy's automatic stay provision enjoyed by a number of financial contracts, such as repo. An automatic stay prohibits collection actions by creditors against a bankrupt debtor or his property. It prevents a creditor from liquidating collateral of a defaulting debtor, since collateral is a lien on the debtor's property. In this paper, we construct a model of repo ...
Working Paper
Fedwire Funds Service: Payments, Balances, and Available Liquidity
We analyze the universe of payments settled through the Fedwire Funds Service--the primary U.S. real-time gross settlement service operated by the Federal Reserve--for the period January 2004 to December 2020. We report on trends in payments volume, payments value, balances, and overdrafts, in addition to documenting changes in the behavior of financial institutions transacting via the Fedwire Funds Service.
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.
Journal Article
An economic perspective on the enforcement of credit arrangements: the case of daylight overdrafts in Fedwire
A fundamental concern for any lender is credit risk - the risk that a borrower will fail to fully repay a loan as expected. Thus, lenders want credit arrangements that are designed to compensate them for - and help them effectively manage - this type of risk. In certain situations, central banks engage in credit arrangements as lenders to banks, so they must manage their exposure to credit risk. This article discusses how the Federal Reserve manages its credit risk exposure associated with daylight overdrafts. The authors first present a simple economic framework for thinking about the causes ...
Working Paper
A model in which outside and inside money are essential
I present an environment for which both outside and inside money are essential as means of payment. The key model feature is that there is imperfect monitoring of issuers of inside money. I use a random matching model of money where some agents have private trading histories and others have trading histories that can be publicly observed only after a lag. I show via an example that for lags that are neither too long nor too short, there exist allocations that use both types of money that cannot be duplicated when only one type is used. Inside money provides liquidity that increases the ...
Working Paper
Distributed Ledger Technology in Payments, Clearing, and Settlement
Digital innovations in finance, loosely known as fintech, have garnered a great deal of attention across the financial industry. Distributed ledger technology (DLT) is one such innovation that has been cited as a means of transforming payment, clearing, and settlement (PCS) processes, including how funds are transferred and how securities, commodities, and derivatives are cleared and settled. DLT is a term that has been used by the industry in a variety of ways and so does not have a single definition. Because there is a wide spectrum of possible deployments of DLT, this paper will refer to ...
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.
Working Paper
Alternative central bank credit policies for liquidity provision in a model of payments
I explore alternative central bank policies for liquidity provision in a model of payments. I use a mechanism design approach so that agents' incentives to default are explicit and contingent on the credit policy designed. In the first policy, the central bank invests in costly enforcement and charges an interest rate to recover costs. I show that the second best solution is not distortionary. In the second policy, the central bank requires collateral. If collateral does not bear an opportunity cost, then the solution is first best. Otherwise, the second best is distortionary because ...