Paul Bauer

Real average U.S. per capita personal income growth over the last 65 years exceeded a remarkable 400 percent.

In the past decade, the U.S. economy has witnessed a tremendous surge in the usage of electronic payment processing services and an increased importance of the firms that provide these services.

This paper investigates whether the Federal Reserve might lower its currency processing costs by reallocating high-speed currency sorting volume among its processing sites.

In this paper, we analyze the service provided by the 13 largest U.S. passenger airlines to the 100 most populous U.S. metropolitan areas in 1989.

Relatively little effort has gone into examining how hub location affects the level of service and degree of competition found at airports in the system.

A comparison of alternative methods for estimating inefficiency and productivity growth in banking, showing that inefficiencies are sufficiently large to dominate scale economies and that measured technological progress has been small.

A study of the effects of bank structure and profitability on the births of new firms, arguing that local credit markets potentially affect firm location decisions.

A decomposition of observed total factor productivity (TFP) growth that examines changes in returns to scale, cost efficiency, and technology and that develops several decompositions using production and cost frontiers.

An overview of the airline industry’s early adaptations to deregulation using a best-practice cost function approach; measures cost efficiency and changes in total factor productivity growth for airlines in the 1970s and early 1980s.

The presentation of a new econometric technique for estimating a system of cost and input share equations that allow for inefficiency.

Because the automated clearinghouse (ACH) has been found to have lower social costs than paper checks, the Federal Reserve has been promoting more widespread use of ACH by lowering ACH processing fees.

We propose a set of consistency conditions that frontier efficiency measures should meet to be most useful for regulatory analysis or other purposes.

This paper uses a stochastic cost frontier to examine the scale economies, cost efficiencies, and technological change of three payment instruments.

Check 21 legislation has enabled the check clearing system to transform from paper to electronics, and much more rapidly than some had predicted.

The information age has led to many new forms of payment, including credit cards, debit cards, and online banking.

As companies and consumers adapt to a changing marketplace, jobs are eliminated and new ones are created.

Even as per capita income hasincreased across the United States,differences among states’ incomesremain.

Labor productivity growth, a measureof output per unit of work, isclosely tied to gains in wages andliving standards, and it providesa direct measure of a country’scompetitive position over time.

The death of paper checks has beenpredicted since the 1960s, but onlyrecently has their use begun to decline.

Identity theft—appropriating someone else’s identity for illicit gain— is the fastest-growing financial crime. It can cause considerable financial losses, and cleaning up a trashed credit history can be time consuming and frustrating.

By requiring financial institutions to put adequate controls in place to secure consumers’ confidential data and by clearly spelling out what rights consumers and financial institutions have, the 1999 Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act ...

This Economic Commentary confirms unusually robust productivity growth of the last few years and explores reasonable assumptions about the likely future pattern of productivity growth. These assumptions can generate substantially different productivity growth paths. Government forecasts, which guide the major tax and benefit programs, have been increased in recent years yet remain cautious.

Money laundering has gone on sincethe first crime was committed forprofit, but it has been explicitly illegalonly since 1986.

With the U.S. unemployment rate at a 30-year historic low and the labor force expected to grow only about 1 percent in the near future, increased productivity could be the key to preserving the country’s robust, noninflationary GDP growth.

Despite the increasing usage of credit and debit cards and the emergence of various electronic payment instruments, currency remains king—at least if that title is based on volume of transactions.

Cyberspace is loosely defined as the collection of computer communication networks that has evolved since the early 1970s.

High living standards depend critically on many types of infrastructure—bom technological and institutional — that few fully comprehend.

From the earliest days of air travel in the United States, the federal government has regulated many aspects of the industry.

The single most important factor in determining a nation’s standard of living in the long run is the productivity of its resources (primarily labor and capital).

Once again the United States has been jolted by an oil price shock. Since Iraq’s August 2 invasion of Kuwait, the cost of crude has soared as high as $41 a barrel.

Deregulation of the airline industry has produced wide-ranging changes that have created benefits and some problems for the public.

The U.S. Census Bureau and the Federal Reserve prepare the two most widely disseminated indexes of capacity utilization.

Capacity-utilization measures can be useful in evaluating industry price pressures, investment, and war mobilization capabilities. In this first article of a two-part series, the authors define and examine some of these measures.

The current performance of the U.S. airline industry with regard to safety, fares, and service has been a topic of widespread concern among policymakers and the public.