Scale Economies, Scope Economies, and Technical Change in Federal Reserve Payment Processing

26 Pages Posted: 17 Mar 2003 Last revised: 28 Feb 2015

See all articles by Robert M. Adams

Robert M. Adams

Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System

Paul W. Bauer

Federal Reserve Banks - Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland

Robin C. Sickles

Rice University - Department of Economics

Date Written: December 17, 2002

Abstract

In the past decade, the US 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. The payments industry has also undergone changes in cost structure with the introduction of new technology. Unfortunately, data on the private provision of payment processing services are not available. However, the Federal Reserve provides similar services and collects data on its own provision of payments processing, offering an opportunity to gain insights into the cost structure of payments processing. In this paper, we estimate the scope and scale economies and the technical change in the Federal Reserve's provision of payments processing from 1990-2000. We find considerable scale economies and evidence of some scope economies for the provision of automated clearinghouse, fedwire, and book-entry services no matter whether we specify a separable quadratic or a translog cost function. In addition, we find that disembodied technical change also contributed to the overall reduction in costs throughout the 1990s.

Keywords: Productivity, scope economies, scale economies, financial institutions

JEL Classification: D2, G2

Suggested Citation

Adams, Robert M. and Bauer, Paul W. and Sickles, Robin C., Scale Economies, Scope Economies, and Technical Change in Federal Reserve Payment Processing (December 17, 2002). FEDS Working Paper No. 2002-57, FRB of Cleveland Working Paper No. 02-13, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=369542 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.369542

Robert M. Adams (Contact Author)

Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System ( email )

20th Street and Constitution Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20551
United States
202-452-2653 (Phone)

Paul W. Bauer

Federal Reserve Banks - Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland ( email )

PO Box 6387
Cleveland, OH 44101
United States
216-579-3021 (Phone)

Robin C. Sickles

Rice University - Department of Economics ( email )

6100 South Main Street
Houston, TX 77005
United States

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