Central banks have become increasingly worried about systemic risks to the financial market and infrastructure stemming from payment systems. Failure to settle by a participant in a netting system can potentially jeopardize the settlement of other participants. The fear of a systemic crisis has...

We use a game theoretical framework to analyze the intraday behavior of banks with respect to settlement of interbank claims in a real time gross settlement setting. We find that the game played by banks depends upon the intraday credit policy of the central bank and that it encompasses two...

We explore the network topology of the federal funds market. This market is important for distributing liquidity throughout the financial system and for the implementation of monetary policy. The recent turmoil in global financial markets underscores its importance. We find that the network is...

Recently, economists have argued that a bank’s importance within the financial system depends not only on its individual characteristics but also on its position within the banking network. A bank is deemed to be “central” if, based on our network analysis, it is predicted to hold the most...

The Federal Home Loan Bank (FHLB) System is a large, complex, and understudied government-sponsored liquidity facility that currently has more than $1 trillion in secured loans outstanding, mostly to commercial banks and thrifts. In this paper, we document the significant role played by the FHLB...

We use a method similar to Google’s PageRank procedure to rank banks in the Canadian Large Value Transfer System (LVTS). Along the way we obtain estimates of the payment processing speeds for the individual banks. These differences in processing speeds are essential for explaining why observed...