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Report
Identifying and evaluating sample selection bias in consumer payment surveys
Making meaningful inferences based on survey data depends on the ability to recognize and adjust for discrepancies between the survey respondents and the target population; this partly involves understanding how survey samples differ with respect to heterogeneous clusters of the population. Ex post adjustments for unbiased population parameter estimates are usually based on easily measured variables with known distributions in the target population, like age, gender, or income. This paper focuses on identifying and assessing the effect of an overlooked source of heterogeneity and potential ...
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
Did the Target data breach change consumer assessments of payment card security?
Previous research has found that perceptions of payment security affect consumers? use of payment instruments. We test whether the Target data breach in 2013 was associated with a change in consumers? perceptions of the security of credit cards and debit cards and with subsequent changes in consumers? use of payment cards. Using data from the Survey of Consumer Payment Choice (SCPC), we find that, controlling for possible confounding effects of demographic differences between the two groups, ratings by consumers who assessed the security of personal information of debit cards shortly after ...
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
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 ...
Working Paper
Sample Bias Related to Household Role
This paper develops a two-stage statistical analysis to identify and assess the effect of a sample bias associated with an individual's household role. Survey responses to questions about the respondent's role in household finances and a sampling design in which some households have all members take the survey enable the estimation of distributions for each individual's share of household responsibility. The methodology is applied to the 2017 Survey of Consumer Payment Choice. The distribution of responsibility shares among survey respondents suggests that the sampling procedure favors ...
Report
Do consumers rely more heavily on credit cards while unemployed?
Leading up to the Great Recession, households increased their credit card debt by over 16 percent ($121 billion) during the five-year period from 2004 to 2009. The unemployment rate simultaneously began to rise in 2008, increasing from 5.0 percent in January 2008 to a high of 10.0 percent in October of 2009. During the recovery, from 2009 to 2014, credit card debt fell by more than 25 percent, as the unemployment rate returned to near prerecession levels. These coincident developments have led to speculation that consumers facing unemployment or job uncertainty may have increased their ...
Working Paper
Measuring unfamiliar economic concepts: the case of prepaid card adoption
Recent evidence suggests that the use of prepaid cards is growing in the United States. The study of how prepaid cards fit into the existing payments market requires accurate data about the adoption of prepaid cards among consumers. This paper describes several experiments conducted by the Consumer Payments Research Center that compare the efficacy of various question forms regarding reported adoption rates. A primary focus is on the effect of "disaggregation" or asking about adoption of a number of prepaid card categories sequentially rather than asking about adoption of prepaid cards as ...
Report
How are U.S. consumers using general purpose reloadable prepaid cards?: are they being used as substitutes for checking accounts?
Owners of general purpose reloadable prepaid cards (GPR) who do not have checking accounts comprise 4.8 percent of U.S. adults, according to the 2012 Survey of Consumer Payment Choice. This report explores two important aspects of prepaid card use: Do owners of GPR prepaid cards who lack checking accounts use these cards differently than those who have checking accounts? Are these cards substituting for payment services that have traditionally been provided only via traditional checking accounts?
Report
The 2014 survey of consumer payment choice: summary results
In 2014, the average number of U.S. consumer payments per consumer per month decreased to 66.1, in a statistically insignificant decline from 67.9 in 2013. The number of payments made by paper check continued to decline, falling by 0.7 to 5.0 checks per month, while the number of electronic payments (online banking bill payments, bank account number payments, and deductions from income) increased by 0.6 to 6.9 of these payments per month. The monthly shares of debit cards (31.1 percent), cash (25.6 percent), and credit cards (23.3 percent) continued to be largest; while the share of ...