In the U.S., the share of payments made "electronically"--with credit cards, debit cards, and direct payments--grew from 25 percent in 1995 to over 50 percent in 2002 (BIS, 2004). This paper frames this aggregate change in the context of individual behavior. Family level data indicate that the...

I explore alternative central bank policies for liquidity provision in a model of payments. I use a mechanism design approach so that agents' incentives to default are explicit and contingent on the credit policy designed. In the first policy, the central bank invests in costly enforcement and...

This paper characterizes the features of an account-based payment card--including bank debit cards, prepaid debit cards, and payroll cards--that elicit a high take-rate among low- and moderate-income (LMI) households, particularly those without bank accounts. We apply marketing research...

This paper provides the necessary technical background to understand basic Bitcoin operations and documents a set of empirical regularities related to Bitcoin usage. We present the micro-structure of the Bitcoin transaction process and highlight the use of cryptography for the purposes of...

Dramatic changes have occurred in the U.S. payment system over the past two decades, most notably an explosion in electronic card-based payments. Not surprisingly, this shift has been accompanied by a series of policy debates, all of which hinge critically on understanding consumer behavior at...

In this paper, we first document some stylized facts about very short-term and long-term corporate yield spreads. We find that short-term spreads are sizable, and the correlations between many firms' short-term and long-term yield spreads are at times negative. We then develop a structural model...

Debit card use at the point of sale has grown dramatically in recent years in the U.S., and now exceeds the number of credit card transactions. However, many questions remain regarding patterns of debit card use, consumer preferences when using debit, and how consumers might respond to explicit...

I present an environment for which both outside and inside money are essential as means of payment. The key model feature is that there is imperfect monitoring of issuers of inside money. I use a random matching model of money where some agents have private trading histories and others have...