This paper examines the possibility that financial contagion may be spread from one bank to another via the Australian payments system. The initial study of payments system risk was undertaken by Humphrey (1986) who found significant risk in the U.S. Fedwire system in the mid 1980s. Subsequent studies by Angelini, Maresca & Russo (1996), Kuussaari (1996), Northcott (2002) and Furfine (2003) have found, however, little evidence of systemic risk in the payments systems of Italy, Finland and Canada, and in the U.S. inter-bank market. Given that the implementation of real time gross settlement (RTGS) systems in many countries, including Australia, at significant cost, has been designed to reduce payments system risk, the finding that this risk is small is significant. While detailed payments system data for Australia is not available to researchers outside the Reserve Bank, this study constructs a synthetic data set based on available information and uses this data to simulate the failure of each financial institution operating in the Australian payments system. We find little evidence of systemic risk in the Australian payments system using this approach and conclude that the introduction of RTGS in the Australian system in 1996 had only a marginal effect on risk.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
Publisher Info
Paper provided by School of Finance and Economics, University of Technology, Sydney in its series Working Paper Series with number
149.
Find related papers by JEL classification: E44 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Money and Interest Rates - - - Financial Markets and the Macroeconomy G21 - Financial Economics - - Financial Institutions and Services - - - Banks; Other Depository Institutions; Mortgages
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.: