About

Rod Garratt is a professor in the economics department at the University of California, Santa Barbara and a member of the Bretton Woods Committee. He has worked as a Senior Advisor at the Bank for International Settlements, a Research Advisor to the Bank of England, and is a former Vice President of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. He has also held visiting scholar positions at the Bank of Canada and the International Monetary Fund. During his time at the FRBNY, he co-led the Virtual Currency Working Group for the Federal Reserve System. From 2015-17, he was a member of the team that completed Project Jasper (phase 1 and 2), the first proof of concept for a wholesale interbank payment system that uses distributed ledger technology. In 2018, he testified before the Subcommittee on Monetary Policy and Trade, U.S. House of Representatives, at a hearing on 'The Future of Money: Digital Currency.' While at the BIS from 2023-25, he helped initiate and implement Project Agorá, a seven-co

Research topics

• Computer Security
• Computer Science
• Business
• Commerce
• Economics
• Finance
• Monetary economics
• Internet privacy
• Actuarial science
• Marketing
• Market economy
• World Wide Web

Selected publications

• The Future of Payment Infrastructure Could Be Permissionless

  2025-11-25

  report1st authorCorresponding

  Following the recent passage of legislation in the U.S., payment stablecoins seem to be on the brink of wider-scale adoption and explosive growth in market capitalization. In this post, we contend that the driving factor is not their proximity to digital cash instruments, but rather how they are transferred—via global, open-access, peer-to-peer systems, or “permissionless blockchains,” for short.

  PublisherDOI

• Which Bank is the "Central" Bank? An Application of Markov Theory to the Canadian Large Value Transfer System

  Staff Reports · 2021-03-18 · 1 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  We use a method similar to Google's PageRank procedure to rank banks in the Canadian Large Value Transfer System (LVTS). Along the way we obtain estimates of the payment processing speeds for the individual banks. These differences in processing speeds are essential for explaining why observed daily distributions of liquidity differ from the initial distributions, which are determined by the credit limits selected by banks.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• An Application of Shapley Value Cost Allocation to Liquidity Savings Mechanisms

  RePEc: Research Papers in Economics · 2021-03-21 · 2 citations

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Liquidity demands in real-time gross settlement payment systems can be enormous. To reduce the liquidity requirement, central banks around the world have implemented liquidity savings mechanisms (LSMs).

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• COVID-19 and the Search for Digital Alternatives to Cash

  RePEc: Research Papers in Economics · 2020 · 1 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Business
  • Finance
  • Commerce

  Today, the majority of retail payments in the United States are digital. Practically all digital payments are tracked, collected, and aggregated by financial institutions, payment providers, and vendors. This trend has accelerated during the COVID-19 pandemic as payments that require physical contact, such as cash, have been discouraged. As cash gradually becomes obsolete, consumers are left with fewer alternatives for making private transactions. In this post, we outline some evidence on the impact of COVID-19 on consumer payment behavior and follow up in the second post in this Liberty Street Economics series with a look at the implications of cash obsolescence for privacy.

  Publisher

• Monetizing Privacy with Central Bank Digital Currencies

  Liberty Street Economics · 2020 · 8 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Computer Security
  • Computer Science
  • Business

  In prior research, we documented evidence suggesting that digital payment adoptions have accelerated as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. While digitalization of payment activity improves data utilization by firms, it can also infringe upon consumers’ right to privacy. Drawing from a recent paper, this blog post explains how payment data acquired by firms impacts market structure and consumer welfare. Then, we discuss the implications of introducing a central bank digital currency (CBDC) that offers consumers a low-cost, privacy-preserving electronic means of payment—essentially, digital cash.

  Publisher

• Token- or Account-Based? A Digital Currency Can Be Both

  Liberty Street Economics · 2020 · 19 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Computer Security
  • Monetary economics

  Digital currencies, including potential central bank digital currencies (CBDC), have generated a lot of interest over the past decade, since the emergence of Bitcoin. The interest has only grown in recent months because of a desire for contactless payment methods, stemming from the coronavirus pandemic. In this post, we discuss a common distinction made between “token-based” and “account-based” digital currencies. We show that this distinction is problematic because Bitcoin and many other digital currencies satisfy both definitions.

  Publisher

• Entrepreneurial Incentives and the Role of Initial Coin Offerings

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2019-01-01

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• La confidentialité, un bien public : arguments en faveur d’une monnaie électronique

  2019-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  L’argent comptant offre un haut niveau de confidentialite a ceux qui l’utilisent pour effectuer des paiements. Cependant, son usage est en declin, car les gens se servent de plus en plus de leurs cartes de debit, de leurs cartes de credit et d’autres moyens pour regler leurs achats.

  Publisher

• Who Sees the Trades? The Effect of Information on Liquidity in Inter-Dealer Markets

  RePEc: Research Papers in Economics · 2019-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Dealers, who strategically supply liquidity to traders, are subject to both liquidity and adverse selection costs. While liquidity costs can be mitigated through inter-dealer trading, individual dealers' private motives to acquire information compromise inter-dealer market liquidity. Post-trade information disclosure can improve market liquidity by counteracting dealers' incentives to become better informed through their market-making activities. Asymmetric disclosure, however, exacerbates the adverse selection problem in inter-dealer markets, in turn decreasing equilibrium liquidity provision. A non-monotonic relationship may arise between the partial release of post-trade information and market liquidity. This points to a practical concern: a strategic post-trade platform has incentives to maximize adverse selection and may choose to release information in a way that minimizes equilibrium liquidity provision.

  OA PDF

• The Economics of Distributed Ledger Technology for Securities Settlement

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2017-01-01 · 45 citations

  articleOpen access
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Todd Keister

  15 shared

• Cheng‐Zhong Qin

  University of California, Santa Barbara

  10 shared

• Morten L. Bech

  Bank for International Settlements

  8 shared

• Karl Shell

  Cornell University

  7 shared

• John M. Marshall

  Innovative Genomics Institute

  6 shared

• Thomas Tröger

  5 shared

• Michael Junho Lee

  Hunter College

  5 shared

• Ted Bergstrom

  4 shared