Merchant fees and reward programs generate an implicit monetary transfer to credit card users from non-card (or "cash") users because merchants generally do not set differential prices for card users to recoup the costs of fees and rewards. On average, each cash-using household pays $149 to...

This paper summarizes the proceedings of the second Consumer Behavior and Payment Choice conference, held at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston on July 2527, 2006. These conferences are unique in featuring the collaboration of two groups of payments experts the private-sector payments industry...

The Emerging Payments Research Group (EPRG) at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston sponsored a new conference, "Consumer Behavior and Payment Choice: How and Why Do Consumers Choose Their Payment Methods?" on October 27-28, 2005, at the Boston Fed. The conference brought together a diverse set of...

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)...

This paper summarizes and outlines some interesting issues that arose during a recent workshop on Consumer Behavior and Payment Choice, hosted by the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston's Emerging Payments Research Group (EPRG) on July 25, 2008. Topics addressed are the consumer adoption of new...

Using data from a nationally representative survey on consumer payment behavior, we estimate Heckman two-stage regressions on the adoption and use of seven different payment instruments. We find that the characteristics of payments are important in determining consumer payment behavior, even...