Greater digitization of commerce has brought enormous benefits to businesses and consumers. By using digital payment capabilities and online marketplaces, many micro, small, and medium enterprises (MSMEs) are more able to compete with larger firms through greater customer choice and reach. This paper examines the results of a Visa Economic...
A core function of any banking system is the provision of payments. However, a greater number of non-banks are becoming part of the payments landscape. Payments can be made via fiat or crypto currencies, bank credit or deposits, or funds transfers on the books of non-bank payment providers. Most of...
Carbó, Chakravorti, and Rodriguez study the impact of lowering interchange fees on consumer and merchant adoption and usage along with bank revenues during a ten-year period in Spain using bank-level data. Using cutting-edge econometric techniques, they are able to test two-sided market model predictions about payment card pricing policies. They...
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...
In this article, Chakravorti asks why have general-purpose stored-value cards been unsuccessful in penetrating the U.S. market? Three necessary conditions for a payment instrument to be successful are discussed: consumers and merchants need to be convinced of its advantages over existing payment alternatives for at least some types of transactions...
Chakravorti and To construct a two-period model to study the interactions among consumers, merchants, and a card issuer. The model yields the following results. First, if the issuer's cost of funds is not too high and the merchant's profit margin is sufficiently high, in every equilibrium of our model the...
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...
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...
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 studies systemic risk in multilateral net settlement systems is investigated using a four-period model. The model focuses on the tradeoff between systemic risk and the cost of interbank transfers along with the importance of the overnight money markets that were a key factor in the most recent financial crisis...