Using data from the United States and Canada, we quantify consumers’ net pecuniary cost of using cash, credit cards, and debit cards for purchases across income cohorts. The net cost includes fees paid to financial institutions, rewards received from credit or debit card issuers, and the...

This paper investigates the effects of credit scores on consumer payment behavior, especially on debit and credit card use. Anecdotally, a negative relationship between debit card use and credit score has been reported; however, it is not clear whether that relationship is related to other...

Authors' note: This paper reports on a research effort by Federal Reserve staff to examine market structure implications in the still‐emerging faster payments market. The analysis and conclusions in this paper are those of the authors and do not indicate official positions of the Board of...

Although chargebacks are perceived as one of the major cost components for merchants to accept card payments, little research has been conducted on them. To fill that gap, this paper describes the current chargeback landscape by generating detailed statistics on chargebacks for signature-based...

To reduce counterfeit fraud in the card-present (CP) environment, the United States started migrating to EMV chip technology in the mid-2010s. Since October 2015, merchants have been liable for counterfeit fraud committed using EMV cards if the merchants have not adopted EMV chip-readable...

This paper examines whether some of the unbanked consumers' choice of general purpose reloadable (GPR) prepaid cards over checking accounts and alternative financial service (AFS) products can be explained by the cost incurred by those consumers. We compare the three types of products by...

Consumers and businesses are increasingly expecting faster payments. While many countries have already developed or are in process of developing faster payments, the availability of these payments is fragmented in the United States. The recently released paper by the Federal Reserve encourages...

Prepaid cards are the most rapidly growing payment instrument. General purpose reloadable (GPR) prepaid cards, in particular, have gained considerable traction especially among the unbanked and underbanked. How these cards are used is now of acute interest to both policymakers, seeking to ensure...

Consumers and businesses are increasingly expecting faster payments. While many countries have already developed or are in process of developing faster payments, the availability of these payments is fragmented in the United States. The recently released paper by the Federal Reserve encourages...

This paper studies product innovation and firm survival in the U.S. ATM/debit card industry. The industry started with a few shared ATM networks in the early 1970s. The number of networks grew quickly up until the mid 1980s, but then declined sharply. We construct a theoretical model based on...