Search Results
Working Paper
Evidence on the role of cash flow for investment
Discussion Paper
Small business use of credit cards in the U.S. market
America?s small businesses have adopted credit cards as both a payment method and a borrowing vehicle. The segment also uses other payment card products, including debit, charge, and prepaid cards. The dollar volume of spending with cards designed for small businesses increased by 230 percent over the five-year period from 2003-2008. But the recession of 2007-2009 and contemporaneous changes in the regulatory environment had effects on both the supply to and demand of small businesses with respect to credit cards. To obtain an update on these issues, the Payment Cards Center hosted a workshop ...
Working Paper
Why doesn’t technology flow from rich to poor countries?
What is the role of a country?s financial system in determining technology adoption? To examine this, a dynamic contract model is embedded into a general equilibrium setting with competitive intermediation. The terms of finance are dictated by an intermediary?s ability to monitor and control a firm?s cash flow, in conjunction with the structure of the technology that the firm adopts. It is not always profitable to finance promising technologies. A quantitative illustration is presented where financial frictions induce entrepreneurs in India and Mexico to adopt less-promising ventures than in ...
Journal Article
Reducing Federal Reserve float
Working Paper
Debit card and cash usage: a cross-country analysis
During the last decade, debit card transactions grew rapidly in most advanced countries. While check usage declined and has almost disappeared in some countries, the stock of currency in circulation has not declined as fast. We use panel estimation techniques to analyze the change in transactional demand for cash resulting from greater usage of debit cards in 13 countries from 1988 to 2003. We are able to disentangle cash?s store of value function from its payment function by separating cash into three denomination categories. We find that the demand for low denomination notes and coins ...
Conference Paper
International comparisons: lessons learned
Journal Article
The sales tax crunch
Working Paper
Who holds cash? and why?
Cash holdings of nonfinancial firms range widely, and are related to firm size, industry and access to the public bond market. Cash holdings are positively correlated with agency proxies, suggesting that firms that cannot borrow easily due to agency problems hold greater cash stocks--perhaps as a cushion to prevent shortfalls in cash flow from impinging on investment. However, this correlation holds only for the very highest cash holders, especially small firms. The group of afflicted firms appears to be less than one-quarter of COMPUSTAT firms. Agency proxies are irrelevant for a large ...
Journal Article
Shopping without cash: the emergence of the e-purse
This article finds that successful e-purse programs tend to have a captive audience that drives critical mass, such as those found in the transportation industry or government sector; an affordable cost structure relative to other payment instruments; compelling incentives for consumers and merchants; and technology that is well tested and addresses standards issues before rollout.