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Report
How do consumers make their payment choices?
Payment transformation has generated a shift from paper to cards and electronic payments in the United States, but there is also a large degree of heterogeneity among consumers in how they pay. We present factors affecting consumer payment behavior, show data on how consumers pay in the United States, and summarize existing literature on consumer payment choice. On the supply side, technology, regulation, and cost affect payment behavior. On the demand side, consumer demographics and income, consumer preferences, and consumer assessments of payment method attributes have all been found ...
Journal Article
Consumer confidence surveys: can they help us forecast consumer spending in real time?
In ?Consumer Confidence Surveys: Can They Help Us Forecast Consumer Spending in Real Time?,? Dean Croushore uses the Philadelphia Fed?s real-time data set to investigate an important question: Does using data available to forecasters at the time ? that is, real-time data ? make measures of consumer confidence more valuable for forecasting?
Report
Inflation expectations and behavior: Do survey respondents act on their beliefs?
We compare the inflation expectations reported by consumers in a survey with their behavior in a financially incentivized investment experiment designed such that future inflation affects payoffs. The inflation expectations survey is found to be informative in the sense that the beliefs reported by the respondents are correlated with their choices in the experiment. Furthermore, most respondents appear to act on their inflation expectations showing patterns consistent (both in direction and magnitude) with expected utility theory. Respondents whose behavior cannot be rationalized tend to be ...
Journal Article
Survey of financial characteristics and consumers