In his lecture as part of a broader course on Effective Oversight of Payment and Settlement Systems: Maintaining Financial Plumbing edited by Charles Kahn, Chakravorti describes the underlying economics of retail payments including substitution of payment instruments, regulation of them, and underlying incentives to use them. He looks at specific...
Bob Chakravorti discusses surcharging and honor-all-cards rules for payment cards. Generally, merchants charge the same price regardless of the type of payment instrument used to make purchases. In many jurisdictions, merchants are not allowed to add a surcharge for payment card transactions because of legal (some states in the U.S...
While payment card usage has increased dramatically, the stock of outstanding currency has not declined as rapidly. Amromin and Chakravorti analyze changes in cash demand for 13 advanced economies from 1988 to 2003 by separating cash into three denomination categories to disentangle its store of wealth and payment functions. Defining...
Chakravorti and Jankowski summarize the 2005 Chicago Payments conference. The migration to more efficient payment mechanisms is affected by innovations, incentives, and regulations. While advances in technology have yielded numerous payment method alternatives, many have not been widely adopted. A Chicago Fed conference explored why certain payment innovations have been...
Chakravorti and Kobor provide a framework to study the creation and adoption of innovations by payment providers and processors. The authors identify several motivating factors for banks and nonbanks to invest in payment innovations. In addition, they discuss the evolutionary process of payment innovations from inception to commoditization and recognize...
Chakravorti and Emmons model side payments in a competitive credit‐card market. If competitive retailers absorb the cost of accepting credit cards by charging a higher goods price to everyone, then someone must subsidize convenience users of credit cards to prevent them from defecting to merchants who do not accept cards...
This article concerns electronic bill presentment and payment (EBPP) in the business-to-consumer (B2C) marketplace and, more specifically, remote bill payments (as opposed to payments made at the point of sale).B2C EBPP applications are plausibly among the most promising innovations to shift U.S. consumer payments from checks to electronic alternatives. By...
Over the last decade, consumers have tripled their use of credit cards as more merchants have increased their acceptance of them. This increase suggests that incentives in today’s marketplace favor greater credit card use by consumers and acceptance by merchants. In this paper, Chakravorti and Shah study the set of...
The Mexican securities clearance and settlement system is ahead of many markets in terms of having one of the shortest settlement periods. However, cross-border transactions—such as those involving American Depositary Receipts—have tended to be associated with a greater number of settlement fails than purely domestic transactions because the U.S. and...
Chakravorti investigates payments system reforms begun by the Bank of Mexico in 1994. The goals of these reforms are to reduce the amount of uncollateralized intraday credit extended by the Bank of Mexico (previously unlimited), to promote a market-based allocation of intraday credit for interbank payments, and to move large-value...