David C. Mills

Risk and Concentration in Payment and Securities Settlement Systems

What drives the intraday patterns of settlement in payment and securities settlement systems? Using a model of the strategic interaction of participants in these systems to capture some stylized facts about the Federal Reserves Fedwire funds and securities systems, this paper identifies three factors that influence a participants decision on when to send transactions intraday: cost of intraday liquidity, extent of settlement risk, and system design. With these factors, the model can make predictions regarding the impact of policy on the concentration of transactions, amount of intraday overdrafts, central bank credit exposure, costs to system participants, and other risks.

Alternative central bank credit policies for liquidity provision in a model of payments

I explore alternative credit policies in a theoretical model where (i) money is necessary as a means of payment, (ii) there is a shortage of liquidity that a central bank addresses through the extension of credit, (iii) money is necessary to repay debts, and (iv) the incentives to default are explicit and contingent on the credit policy designed. Using a mechanism design approach, I compare a credit policy of charging an interest rate on credit with that of requiring the posting of collateral. I find that the pricing policy can implement good allocations while the collateral policy cannot whenever collateral bears an opportunity cost.

Mechanism Design and the Role of Enforcement in Freeman's Model of Payments

Freeman (1996a) is the first to formulate a model in which (i) debts are repaid with money and (ii) there can arise liquidity problems which give rise to a role for a central bank discount window. I ask whether this payment system is truly essential in his model. It is not because there is another mechanism - one which features (i) and (ii) - that works well. This is because of a strong assumption regarding the enforcement of debt contracts. I then present a slightly different model of enforcement based on collateralized lending where (i) is necessary, but (ii) is not. (Copyright: Elsevier)

Risk and concentration in payment and securities settlement systems

What drives the intraday patterns of settlement in payment and securities settlement systems? Using a model of the strategic interaction of participants in these systems to capture some stylized facts about the Federal Reserves Fedwire funds and securities systems, this paper identifies three factors that influence a participants decision on when to send transactions intraday: cost of intraday liquidity, extent of settlement risk, and system design. With these factors, the model can make predictions regarding the impact of policy on the concentration of transactions, amount of intraday overdrafts, central bank credit exposure, costs to system participants, and other risks.

Default Risk and Collateral in the Absence of Commitment

Default risk is an important concern for lenders and is a main reason they require borrowers to pledge collateral. There are two reasons for this. The first is that collateral provides some incentive for the borrower to not strategically default. The second is that, in the event of default, the lender can liquidate the collateral and salvage some value from the failed credit relationship. This paper provides a model to study properties of allocations that arise when collateral is part of an optimal lending contract that looks much like a repurchase agreement. In particular, a lack of commitment to future actions implies that collateral must be used to alleviate strategic default. Moreover, because collateral is held by lenders during the credit relationship, there is also a potential incentive for lenders to default on returning collateralized assets. Thus, the optimal contract requires the satisfaction of an incentive constraint for the lender, in addition to the one that must be satisfied for the borrower. The paper then discusses how the need to satisfy both constraints places certain restrictions on the allocations that arise when collateral is part of an optimal contract. We conclude by comparing the allocation to a world where agents can commit to future actions.

Imperfect Monitoring and the Discounting of Inside Money

This article evaluates the efficiency of a requirement that private issuers redeem inside money on demand at par in a random-matching model of money where the issuers of inside money are imperfectly monitored. I find that for sufficiently imperfect monitoring, a par redemption requirement leads to lower social welfare than if private money were redeemed at a discount. A central message of the article is that if inside money and outside money are not perfect substitutes, a par redemption requirement may not be socially optimal because such a requirement effectively binds them to circulate as if they are.

Distributed Ledger Technology in Payments, Clearing, and Settlement

Digital innovations in finance, loosely known as fintech, have garnered a great deal of attention across the financial industry. Distributed ledger technology (DLT) is one such innovation that has been cited as a means of transforming payment, clearing, and settlement (PCS) processes, including how funds are transferred and how securities, commodities, and derivatives are cleared and settled. DLT is a term that has been used by the industry in a variety of ways and so does not have a single definition. Because there is a wide spectrum of possible deployments of DLT, this paper will refer to the technology as some combination of components including peer-to-peer networking, distributed data storage, and cryptography that, among other things, can potentially change the way in which the storage, recordkeeping, and transfer of a digital asset is done.

An economic perspective on the enforcement of credit arrangements: the case of daylight overdrafts in Fedwire

A fundamental concern for any lender is credit risk - the risk that a borrower will fail to fully repay a loan as expected. Thus, lenders want credit arrangements that are designed to compensate them for - and help them effectively manage - this type of risk. In certain situations, central banks engage in credit arrangements as lenders to banks, so they must manage their exposure to credit risk. This article discusses how the Federal Reserve manages its credit risk exposure associated with daylight overdrafts. The authors first present a simple economic framework for thinking about the causes of credit risk and the possible tools that lenders have to help them manage it. They then apply this framework to the Federal Reserves Payments System Risk policy, which specifies the use of a variety of tools to manage credit risk. The study also analyzes a possible increase in the use of collateral as a credit risk management tool, as presented in a recent proposal by the Federal Reserve concerning changes to the Payments System Risk policy.