Scale Economies, Scope Economies, and Technical Change in Federal Reserve Payment Processing
估计了1990至2000年间美联储支付处理业务的规模经济、范围经济和技术变革，发现显著的规模经济和一定的范围经济，且技术变革降低了成本。
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. In this paper,we estimate scale economies, scope economies, and technical change in the Federal Reserve's provision of payments processing from 1990 to 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.