Search Results
Conference Paper
Job reallocation and the business cycle: new facts for an old debate
Report
The 2010 Survey of Consumer Payment Choice: Summary Results
In 2010, the number of consumer payments increased nearly 9 percent from 2009 as economic activity began to rebound from the financial crisis and recession. Cash payments by consumers, which had increased sharply in 2009, did not fall back but rather grew another 3 percent in 2010. However, the share of cash payments, the dollar amount of cash withdrawals, and cash holdings by consumers decreased moderately in 2010. Credit card payments by consumers increased 15 percent, reversing more than half the 2009 decline, and the steady trend decline in paper check payments by consumers continued. ...
Journal Article
The evolution of regional manufacturing employment: gross job flows within and between firms and industries
The distribution of manufacturing employment across regions of the United States has changed tremendously over time. Shares of manufacturing employment in older, northern regions of the country have declined markedly relative to shares in the Sunbelt regions. But the shifting of manufacturing employment shares goes beyond the well known migration of population to the South and West. Manufacturing employment relative to population has also fallen in northern regions, and even the absolute number of manufacturing jobs has declined in these areas as well. ; Anecdotal evidence suggests that some ...
Conference Paper
The roles of comovement and inventory investment in the reduction of output volatility
More than 80 percent of the decline in the variance of aggregate output since 1984 is accounted for by a decline in the covariance (and correlation) of output among industries that hold inventories. Using a HAVAR macro model (Fratantoni and Schuh 2003) with only two sectors, manufacturing and trade, we show that this decline in comovement ? and thus much of the Great Moderation in aggregate and industry-level output ? is explained largely by changes in the structural relationships between sectors? sales and inventory investment, rather than by ?good luck.? A small part of the Moderation is ...
Working Paper
Why are (some) consumers (finally) writing fewer checks?: the role of payment characteristics
Since the mid-1990s, the U.S. payment system has been undergoing a transformation featuring a significant decline in the use of paper checks that has been quite uneven across consumers and not well understood. This paper estimates econometric models of consumers? adoption (extensive margin) and use (intensive margin) of checks plus six other common U.S. payment instruments, using a comprehensive new data source on consumer payment choice. We find that payment characteristics are the most important determinants of payment instrument use. Plausible changes in the relative convenience and cost ...
Report
How do speed and security influence consumers' payment behavior?
The Federal Reserve Financial Services (FRFS) strategic plan for 2012-2016 named improvements in the end-to-end speed and security of the payment system as two of its policy initiatives. End-to-end in this context means that for the first time end-users are explicitly included. Earlier versions of the strategy plan were circulated for public comment, and the feedback received by FRFS specifically identified a need for further research. This brief draws upon new data from the 2013 Survey of Consumer Payment Choice and employs econometric modeling and simulation to complement FRFS-commissioned ...
Journal Article
Beyond shocks: what causes business cycles? an overview
What makes economies rise and fall? What caused the Asian crisis, the recessions of the 1970's and 1980's, and even the Great Depression? According to many modern economists, shocks did. This unsatisfying answer lies at the heart of a currently popular framework for analyzing business cycle fluctuations. This framework assumes that the macroeconomy usually obeys simple behavioral relationships but is occasionally disrupted by large "shocks", which force it temporarily away from these relationships and into recession. The behavioral relationships then guide the orderly recovery of the ...
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
How consumers pay: adoption and use of payments
Using data from a nationally representative survey on consumer payment behavior, we estimate Heckman two-stage regressions on the adoption and use of seven different payment instruments. We find that the characteristics of payments are important in determining consumer payment behavior, even when controlling for demographic and financial attributes: setup and record keeping are especially important in explaining adoption, while security is important in explaining which methods consumers use for transactions. For the first time, we estimate the number of payment methods adopted by consumers ...
Working Paper
U.S. consumer demand for cash in the era of low interest rates and electronic payments
U.S. consumers' demand for cash is estimated with new panel micro data for 2008-2010 using econometric methodology similar to Mulligan and Sala-i-Martin (2000); Attanasio, Guiso, and Jappelli (2002); and Lippi and Secchi (2009). We extend the Baumol-Tobin model to allow for credit card payments and revolving debt, as in Sastry (1970). With interest rates near zero, cash demand by consumers using credit cards for convenience (without revolving debt) has the same small, negative, interest elasticity as estimated in earlier periods and with broader money measures. However, cash demand by ...