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Briefing
What Is SWIFT, and Could Sanctions Impact the U.S. Dollar's Dominance?
The recent removal of Russian banks from the SWIFT messaging system has highlighted the importance of payments in supporting economies. But the weaponization of SWIFT has also left some commentators worrying about the loss of the U.S. dollar's dominance, as it might drive banks and firms to other substitutes. This Economic Brief discusses the economics of SWIFT and explains why emigrating from the U.S. dollar may be more difficult than we thought.
Briefing
Should Central Banks Worry About Facebook's Diem and Alibaba's Alipay?
Alibaba — an e-commerce platform in China similar to Amazon — has created its own payment system (Alipay) to provide currency-like services: facilitating transactions, supporting peer-to-peer transfers and paying interest. Platforms like Facebook and Amazon are also researching creating their own digital currencies, but so far they have relied primarily on existing payment methods. What drives platforms to develop their own digital currency rather than use existing cash and card options? And should central banks and financial regulators worry about platforms issuing their own currency?
Working Paper
Optimal Incentive Contracts with Job Destruction Risk
We study the implications of job destruction risk for optimal incentives in a long-term contract with moral hazard. We extend the dynamic principal-agent model of Sannikov (2008) by adding an exogenous Poisson shock that makes the match between the firm and the agent permanently unproductive. In modeling job destruction as an exogenous Poisson shock, we follow the Diamond-Mortensen-Pissarides search-and-matching literature. The optimal contract shows how job destruction risk is shared between the rm and the agent. Arrival of the job-destruction shock is always bad news for the rm but can be ...
Working Paper
Payments on Digital Platforms: Resiliency, Interoperability and Welfare
Digital platforms, such as Alibaba and Amazon, operate an online marketplace to facilitate transactions. This paper studies a platform’s business model choice between accepting cash and issuing tokens, as well as the implications for welfare, resiliency, and interoperability. A cash platform free rides on the existing payment infrastructure and profits from collecting transaction fees. A token platform earns seigniorage, albeit bearing the costs of setting up the system and holding reserves to mitigate the cyber risk. Tokens earn consumers a return, insulating transactions from the ...
Working Paper
A Tractable Model of Monetary Exchange with Ex-Post Heterogeneity
We construct a continuous-time, New-Monetarist economy with general preferences that displays an endogenous, non-degenerate distribution of money holdings. Properties of equilibria are obtained analytically and equilibria are solved in closed form in a variety of cases. We study policy as incentive-compatible transfers financed with money creation. Lump-sum transfers are welfare-enhancing when labor productivity is low, but regressive transfers achieve higher welfare when labor productivity is high. We introduce illiquid government bonds and draw implications for the existence of ...
Journal Article
Self-Insurance and the Risk-Sharing Role of Money
Overcoming the lack of coincidence of wants is a well-acknowledged role of money. In this review, I illustrate that the use of money also promotes risk-sharing in the society: when individuals hold money, it helps other individuals mitigate their own liquidity risks.
Briefing
Should the Fed Issue Digital Currency?
The United States might benefit from eventually replacing most physical cash with central bank digital currency (CBCD), but first the Federal Reserve must resolve several key policy and implementation issues, such as establishing comparative advantage over private issuers and ensuring safety and soundness.
Working Paper
Contingent Debt and Performance Pricing in an Optimal Capital Structure Model with Financial Distress and Reorganization
Building on the trade-off between agency costs and monitoring costs, we develop a dynamic theory of optimal capital structure with financial distress and reorganization. Costly monitoring eliminates the agency friction and thus the risk of inefficient liquidation. Our key assumption is that monitoring cannot be applied instantaneously. Rather, transitions between agency and monitoring are subject to search frictions. In the optimal contract, the firm seeks a monitoring opportunity whenever it is financially distressed, i.e., when the risk of liquidation is high. If a monitoring opportunity ...
Briefing
Why Stablecoins Fail: An Economist’s Post-Mortem on Terra
Why do some stablecoins, such as Terra's UST, fail but others do not? Was Terra just an unlucky victim of a classic bank run or speculative attack? Or was its high-yield deposit offering doomed to fail like a Ponzi scheme? What is the limit of the stablecoin's algorithm? What makes payment stable? In this article, we'll dive into potential answers to these questions about the failed stablecoin.