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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 ...
Report
The 2013 Survey of Consumer Payment Choice: Technical Appendix
This report serves as the technical appendix to the 2013 Survey of Consumer Payment Choice. The Survey of Consumer Payment Choice (SCPC) is an annual study, conducted since 2008 through a partnership between the Consumer Payments Research Center (CPRC) at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston and the RAND Corporation, designed primarily to collect data on attitudes to and use of various payment instruments by consumers over the age of 18 in the United States. The main report, which introduces the survey and discusses the principal economic results, can be found here. This data report details the ...
Report
The 2014 Survey of Consumer Payment Choice: Technical Appendix
This document serves as the technical appendix to the 2014 Survey of Consumer Payment Choice administered by the RAND Corporation. The Survey of Consumer Payment Choice (SCPC) is an annual study designed primarily to collect data on attitudes to and use of various payment instruments by consumers over the age of 18 in the United States. The main report, which introduces the survey and discusses the principal economic results, can be found at http://www.bostonfed.org/economic/cprc/SCPC. In this data report, we detail the technical aspects of the survey design, implementation, and analysis.
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 ...
Report
Estimating Population Means in the 2012 Survey of Consumer Payment Choice
This report examines the effect of adding to a longitudinal panel on estimates of population parameters in the 2012 Survey of Consumer Payment Choice (SCPC) more than 1,000 newly recruited respondents specifically targeted to fill segments of the U.S. population that tend to be underbanked and underrepresented in the longitudinal panel. In many ways, the new respondents have fundamentally different characteristics from the ongoing respondents. To minimize confounding sources of change to annual estimates when making comparisons across years, the official 2012 SCPC publication was based on the ...
Report
Consumer Payment Choice for Bill Payments
Why do U.S. consumers pay their bills the way they do? Using data from a recent diary of consumer payment behavior, we find that the type of bill consumers are paying and how they are paying (online or automatically) are important factors in determining the payment method, in addition to the dollar value of the bill and the demographic and income profile of the individual who is paying. In contrast, dollar value and demographic attributes are found to be the most important factors determining the payment instrument chosen for purchases. Consumer choices for bill payments are somewhat ...
Report
The 2010 Survey of Consumer Payment Choice: Technical Appendix
This document serves as the technical appendix to the 2010 Survey of Consumer Payment Choice. The Survey of Consumer Payment Choice (SCPC) is an annual study designed primarily to study the evolving attitudes to and use of various payment instruments by consumers over the age of 18 in the United States. The main report, which introduces the survey and discusses the principal economic results, can be found here. In this data report, we detail the technical aspects of the survey design, implementation, and analysis.
Report
Use of Checks in Selected Countries
This report presents a snapshot of check use as a means of payment in 20 countries from 2012 to 2021. Using charts and tables, we analyze the share of checks as a fraction of cashless payments, both in terms of volume and value and the average value of a check in US dollars based on purchase power parity (PPP) exchange rates. Then we examine and compare the rates of decline in the use of checks during the period 2012 to 2021 and the correlations between the use of checks and other cashless payments, both in terms of volume and value.
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. ...
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 ...