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...

This paper describes key results from the 2016 Diary of Consumer Payment Choice (DCPC), the third in a series of diary surveys that measure payment behavior through the daily recording of U.S. consumers' spending. In October 2016, consumers paid mostly with cash (31 percent of payments), debit...

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 2014, the average number of U.S. consumer payments per consumer per month decreased to 66.1, in a statistically insignificant decline from 67.9 in 2013. The number of payments made by paper check continued to decline, falling by 0.7 to 5.0 checks per month, while the number of electronic...

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...

U.S. consumer cash payments averaged 26 percent of all U.S. consumer payments by number (volume share) from 2008 to 2015, according to the Survey of Consumer Payment Choice (SCPC), and were essentially unchanged between 2012 and 2015. New estimates from the Diary of Consumer Payment Choice...

This document serves as the technical appendix to the 2012 Diary of Consumer Payment Choice administered by the RAND Corporation. The Diary of Consumer Payment Choice (DCPC) is a study designed primarily to collect data on financial transactions over a three-day period by consumers over the age...

This document serves as the technical appendix to the 2015 Survey of Consumer Payment Choice administered by the Dornsife Center for Economic and Social Research (CESR). The Survey of Consumer Payment Choice (SCPC) is an annual study designed primarily to collect data on attitudes to and use of...

The 2015 Survey of Consumer Payment Choice (SCPC) was implemented using a new longitudinal panel, the Understanding America Study (UAS), and results are not yet comparable to the 2008–2014 SCPC. In 2015, U.S. consumers made 68.9 payments per month. Debit cards remained the most popular payment...

In mid-2010, an amendment was passed to Regulation E, which implements the Electronic Fund Transfer Act, requiring financial institutions to ask consumers whether or not they want overdraft protection for automated teller machine (ATM) transactions and everyday purchases made with a debit card....