Economic history and research can provide useful tools for thinking about the future of AI and the challenges and risks along the way.

An a la carte compensation model could improve the performance of the housing brokerage sector.

Agents for homebuyers are typically paid a percentage of the final sale price, so the more their clients spend on a house, the more money they make.

How much should imitators compensate innovators for using their ideas?

Perhaps history can be a guide on whether central banks should issue digital currencies.

Even exploring a CBDC without ultimately issuing one can provide significant benefits.

The U.S. is considered a leader in payment services, yet it has fallen behind countries like China and Kenya in mobile payment innovation.

The U.S. might benefit from replacing physical cash with central bank digital currency, but first the Fed must resolve several policy and implementation issues.

What's behind those consumer spending and saving dynamics, and what do those April numbers mean for the broader economy?

Research at the Richmond Fed has exploited a large dataset of cash, check, credit card, and debit card transactions at a nationwide retail chain to examine consumer payment choice based on transaction size and location, day-of-week and day-of-month cycles, and longer-term trends.

New survey results suggest that the regulation has had limited and unequal effects on merchants. This Economic Brief discusses the causes of these findings as well as the implications of the regulation for end users.

Many merchants have complained that the fees far exceed issuers' costs for processing such transactions. In response to those complaints, Congress directed the Federal Reserve to impose a cap on debit card interchange fees.

Why do debit card networks base their fees on a percentage of transaction amounts when the marginal cost of executing a transaction does not vary by amount?

The authors demonstrate how the real estate agent compensation structure deviates from cost basis and may lead to elevated home prices, overused agent services, and prolonged home searches.

We construct a dynamic model with sequential payment innovations to explain this phenomenon, which uncovers how advanced economies' past success in adopting card-payment technology holds them back in the mobile-payment race.

We study innovation and diffusion of technology at the industry level. We derive an industry's evolution, from birth to its maturity, and we characterize how diffusion affects the incentive to innovate.

Using three years of transactions data from a discount retailer with thousands of stores, we study payment variation along three dimensions: transaction size and location; weekly and monthly frequencies; and longer time horizons.

This paper studies intended and unintended consequences of price cap regulation in the two-sided payment card market.

This paper explains why platforms such as Amazon and Visa rely predominantly on ad-valorem fees, fees which increase proportionally with transaction prices. It also provides a new explanation for why ad-valorem sales taxes are more desirable than specific taxes.

This paper provides a new theory for two-sided payment card markets. Adopting payment cards requires consumers and merchants to pay a fixed cost, but yields a lower marginal cost of making payments.