In his testimony, Bob Chakravorti elaborated on the following areas: first, the state of the economic literature on the costs and benefits of capital regulation; second, the enormous changes that we have seen post-crisis in the bank capital regulatory landscape and the ensuing changes to the quality and quantity of...
Baumann, Chakravorti, and Shaaya identify and summarize the recent academic and industry literature on the benefits of large banks from the perspective of economies of scale and scope along with the benefits of a large, diverse set of products and services provided by a large bank. Second, they explore how...
Payment cards continue to replace cash and checks in advanced economies. Along with the growth of payment card transactions has come greater scrutiny by public authorities of certain payment network rules along with the level of certain fees. Chakravorti reviews the growing payment card literature and discusses the impact of...
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...
The proportion of retail, non-cash payments made electronically in the U.S. grew from 15% in 1979 to 40% in 2000. A recent Chicago Fed conference addressed the important question of whether today's payment networks can adequately support emerging payment technologies.
Credit cards provide benefits to consumers and merchants not provided by other payment instruments as evidenced by their explosive growth in the number and value of transactions over the last 20 years. Recently, credit card networks have come under scrutiny from regulators and antitrust authorities around the world. The costs...
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...
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...