Research Database

This article reexamines the conventional wisdom that commercial banking is in severe decline. A careful reading of the evidence does not support it. True, on-balance sheet assets held by commercial banks have declined as a share of total intermediary assets. But this measure ignores the substantial growth in banks' off-balance sheet activities, in off-shore lending by foreign banks, and in the size of the financial intermediation sector. Adjusted for these considerations, the bank-assets measure shows no clear evidence of secular decline. Neither does an alternative measure, constructed using data from the national income accounts. At most, banking may have suffered a slight loss of market share lately. But this loss is a temporary response to a series of adverse shocks rather than the start of a permanent decline.

In this paper we use the common perspective provided by the neoclassical growth model to evaluate the size of the distortions associated with different monetary and fiscal policies designed to finance a given sequence of government expenditures. We construct an artificial monetary economy incorporating the cash-in-advance framework of Lucas and Stokey (1983), calibrate it to match important features of the U.S. economy, and simulate it to provide a quantitative assessment of the welfare costs associated with government policies involving different combinations of taxes on capital and labor income, consumption, and holdings of money. In particular, we evaluate the welfare gains from tax reforms that are designed to replace taxes on capital or labor income with other forms of taxation. Our results suggest that the welfare costs of financing a given sequence of government expenditures are slightly lower in economies that substitute inflation or consumption taxes for the tax on labor income, but dramatically lower for economies that substitute any of these taxes for the tax on capital income. Replacing the capital tax with a consumption tax, for example, eliminates 81 percent of the welfare cost arising from distorting taxation. In addition, we show that these welfare costs can be reduced further by eliminating the capital tax with a nonstationary policy that involves a transition to a temporary policy followed by a new steady state policy rather than an immediate change to a new steady state policy.

A classic example of a privately created interbank payments system was operated by the Suffolk Bank of New England (1825–58). Known as the Suffolk Banking System, it was the nation’s first regionwide net-clearing system for bank notes. While it operated, notes of all New England banks circulated at par throughout the region. Some have concluded from this experience that unfettered competition in the provision of payments services can produce an efficient payments system. But another look at the history of the Suffolk Banking System questions this conclusion. The Suffolk Bank earned extraordinary profits, and note-clearing may have been a natural monopoly. There is no consensus in the literature about whether unfettered operation of markets with natural monopolies produces an efficient allocation of resources.

This study was originally published in the St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank’s Review (May/June 1998, vol. 80, no. 3, pp. 105–16).

This article investigates the business cycle implications of the planning phase of business investment projects. Time to plan is built into a Kydland-Prescott time-to-build model, which assumes that investment projects take four periods to complete. In the Kydland-Prescott time-to-build model, resources for these projects flow uniformly across the four periods; in the time-to-plan model, few resources are used in the first period. The investigation determines that incorporating time to plan in this way improves the model's ability to account for three key features of U.S. business cycles: their persistence, or the fact that when output growth is above (or below) average, it tends to remain high (or low) for a few quarters; the fact that productivity leads hours worked over the business cycle; and the fact that business investment in structures and business investment in equipment lag output over the cycle.