In 2010, the Department of Justice (DOJ) filed a lawsuit against the credit card networks American Express, MasterCard, and Visa for alleged antitrust violations. We evaluate the extent to which the recently proposed settlement between the DOJ and Visa and MasterCard (henceforth, Proposed...

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...

The Big Five personality traits—openness to experience, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism—are widely used in understanding human behavior. Using data collected from a survey and diary of consumer payment choice, we investigate how the Big Five traits affect...

The use of paper instruments—cash and checks—has been declining in the United States, and consumers have been gradually replacing paper with cards and electronic payments. Stavins (2021) examines the evolution of payments from paper to cards and electronic payments, while Shy (2020) shows...

Banks impose a variety of account fees, and credit card issuers impose a variety of fees related to card usage. Using detailed data from a 2021 representative diary survey of US consumers, we investigate whether lower-income consumers and Black consumers are more likely to pay bank account or...

This paper contributes to an understanding of internationally generated adjustment costs by demonstrating a statistically significant and economically relevant effect of the real exchange rate on job creation and job destruction in U.S. manufacturing industries over the period 1973 to 1993. The...

Since the mid-1990s, the U.S. payment system has undergone a transformation featuring a significant decline in the use of paper checks that is quite uneven across consumers and not well understood. This paper shows that characteristics of payment instruments are the most important determinants...

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...

The way that consumers make payments is changing rapidly and attracts important current policy interest. This paper develops and estimates a structural model of adoption and use of payment instruments by U.S. consumers. We use a cross-section of data from the Survey of Consumer Payment Choice, a...

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...