Search Results
Report
Financial inclusion and consumer payment choice
This report examines similarities and differences among three groups of consumers: those without a checking or savings account (unbanked), bank account adopters who have used alternative financial services (AFS) in the past 12 months (underbanked), and bank account adopters who did not use AFS in the past 12 months (fully banked). Consumers in the three groups have different demographic characteristics, income, and payment behaviors: ?The payment behavior of the underbanked is similar to that of the fully banked. ?Unbanked consumers make fewer payments per month than the fully banked and the ...
Report
The 2017 Diary of Consumer Payment Choice
This paper describes key results from the 2017 Diary of Consumer Payment Choice (DCPC), the fourth in a series of diary surveys that measure payment behavior through the daily recording of U.S. consumers' spending. The DCPC is the only diary survey of U.S. consumer payments available free to the public. In October 2017, consumers paid mostly with cash (30.3 percent of payments), debit cards (26.2 percent), and credit cards (21.0 percent). These instruments accounted for three-quarters of the number of payments, but only about 40 percent of the total value of payments, because they tend to be ...
Journal Article
Prepaid cards: lots of flavors, not all delicious
Some consumers use prepaid cards like cash?others, in place of a bank account.
Report
Consumers' use of overdraft protection
In mid-2010, an amendment was passed to Regulation E, which implements the Electronic Fund Transfer Act, requiring financial institutions to ask consumers whether or not they want overdraft protection for automated teller machine (ATM) transactions and everyday purchases made with a debit card. This Research Data Report studies the short-term impact of this amendment by examining consumers? adoption of overdraft protection, the incidence of overdrawing at least once within a 12-month period, and the incidence of paying a fee for overdrawing, before and after the opt-in rule took effect.
Research on Paying with Cash and Checks
The United States is a land of many firsts: first flight in an airplane (1903). First person on the moon (1969). First email sent (1971). First nation to go fully paperless for payments? Not so likely.
Report
U. S. consumer cash use, 2012 and 2015: an introduction to the Diary of Consumer Payment Choice
U.S. consumer cash payments averaged 26 percent of all U.S. consumer payments by number (volume share) from 2008 to 2015, according to the Survey of Consumer Payment Choice (SCPC), and were essentially unchanged between 2012 and 2015. New estimates from the Diary of Consumer Payment Choice (DCPC) show that the volume share of consumer cash payments is higher than estimated in the SCPC and suggest that the cash volume share was 8 percentage points lower in 2015 than in 2012. The DCPC most likely does not provide an accurate estimate of the actual change in the cash volume share, however, due ...
Working Paper
Consumer Payment Choice for Bill Payments
Why do US consumers pay their bills the way they do? Using data from a recent diary of consumer payment behavior, we find that the type of bill consumers are paying and how they are paying (online or automatically) are important factors in determining the payment method, in addition to the dollar value of the bill and the demographic and income profile of the individual who is paying. In contrast, dollar value and demographic attributes are found to be the most important factors determining the payment instrument chosen for purchases. Consumer choices for bill payments are somewhat ...
Report
U.S. consumers' holdings and use of $100 bills
Conventional wisdom asserts that $100 bills are often associated with crime and foreign cash holdings, leading some commentators to call for their elimination; in light of this proposal, it is useful to examine the legal, domestic use of cash. This report uses new data from the 2012 Diary of Consumer Payment Choice (DCPC) to evaluate consumer use of $100 bills as a means of payment.
Working Paper
Defining Households That Are Underserved in Digital Payment Services
US households that lack digital means of making and receiving payments cannot participate fully in an increasingly digitized economy. Assessing the scope of this problem and addressing it requires a definition of households that are underserved in digital payments. Traditional definitions of households underserved in the banking system—those that are unbanked and those that are underbanked—do not account for the ownership of nonbank transaction accounts that can be used to make and receive digital payments. In this paper, we define households underserved in digital payments by considering ...
Working Paper
Personality Traits and Financial Outcomes
The Big Five personality traits—openness to experience, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism—are widely used in understanding human behavior. Using data collected from a survey and diary of consumer payment choice, we investigate how the Big Five traits affect three financial outcomes: being unbanked, holding a credit card, and carrying credit card debt. Although each personality trait is correlated with each of the financial outcomes we examine, they mostly become statistically insignificant when we control for demographics and income in regressions. Carrying ...