The welfare effects of a liquidity-saving mechanism

Enghin Atalay, Antoine Martin and James McAndrews

No 331, Staff Reports from Federal Reserve Bank of New York

Abstract: This paper considers the welfare effect of introducing a liquidity-saving mechanism (LSM) in a real-time gross settlement (RTGS) payment system. We study the planner's problem to get a better understanding of the economic role of an LSM and find that an LSM can achieve the planner's allocation for some parameter values. The planner's allocation cannot happen without an LSM, as long as some payments can be delayed without cost. We show that, in equilibrium with an LSM, there can be either too few or too many payments settled early compared with the planner's allocation, depending on the parameter values. Using Fedwire data to calibrate our model, we describe the equilibrium that would arise with an LSM and compare welfare with and without an LSM. Our results suggest that introducing an LSM could have significant benefits.

Keywords: Bank liquidity; Fedwire; Payment systems; Banks and banking, Central (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2008
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (29)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.newyorkfed.org/medialibrary/media/research/staff_reports/sr331.html (text/html)
https://www.newyorkfed.org/medialibrary/media/research/staff_reports/sr331.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:fip:fednsr:331

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
pipubs@ny.frb.org

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Staff Reports from Federal Reserve Bank of New York Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Gabriella Bucciarelli (gabriella.bucciarelli@ny.frb.org).