Search Results
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 ...
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 ...
Journal Article
Business Checking Freedom Act
Journal Article
The economics of Americans’ love affair with checks
Working Paper
Families' use of payment instruments during a decade of change in the U.S. payment system
In the U.S., the share of payments made "electronically"--with credit cards, debit cards, and direct payments--grew from 25 percent in 1995 to over 50 percent in 2002 (BIS, 2004). This paper frames this aggregate change in the context of individual behavior. Family level data indicate that the share of families using or holding these instruments also increased over the same period. The personal characteristics that predict use and holdings are relatively constant over time. Furthermore, the results indicate that the aggregate change may be correlated with a greater incidence in ...
Working Paper
Payment choice with consumer panel data
We exploit scanner data to track payment choice for grocery purchases for a large panel of households over three years. We show that households focus most of their expenditures on one or at most two of these instruments in choosing between using cash, a check, or a card, and they very rarely switch. We focus particularly on the role of expenditure size in determining payment choice. While the use of a long panel for these purposes is novel, the introduction of controls for household heterogeneity has little effect on our estimates. Thus, we find that transaction size is an important ...
Journal Article
Checking accounts: what do banks offer and what do consumers value?
Recent evidence shows that the supply of deposits to checking accounts is not elastic with respect to the interest rates paid. That suggests that various features attached to checking accounts may be important in determining the supply of deposits and banks' and revenues from the fees. This study uses a national survey of checking accounts offered by financial institutions in 25 major metropolitan areas in the United States to analyze the effects of restrictions and fees imposed on checking account holders on the supply of deposits and on the banks' check fee revenues. The author places ...
Briefing
Payments fraud : consumer considerations
This article examines the potential for fraud associated with various "traditional" payment methods and the protective measures that consumers should take when using them.