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 the...

Using transaction data from a US consumer payments diary, we revisit the credit card debt puzzle-a scenario in which consumers revolve credit card debt while also keeping liquid assets as bank account deposits. This scenario is very common: 42 percent of consumers in our sample were...

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 three...

In consumer credit, "ability-to-pay" (ATP) rules require lenders to consider whether the consumer can repay a loan without experiencing undue hardship. ATP rules have recently been implemented or considered in many countries and markets. Using a large panel of credit card accounts, we study the...

We present a vision for improving household financial surveys by integrating responses from questionnaires more completely with financial statements and combining them with payments data from diaries. Integrated household financial accounts - balance sheet, income statement, and statement of...

Why do US consumers pay their bills the way they do? Using data from a recent diary of consumer payment behavior, we find that the type of bill consumers are paying and how they are paying (online or automatically) are important factors in determining the payment method, in addition to the...

In this paper, we present updated measures of racial disparities in wealth using the most recent data from the Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF), augmented by household-level estimates of defined benefit (DB) pension wealth developed by Sabelhaus and Volz (2020). Including this important asset,...

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 is the first to empirically examine the impact of a man-made disaster on consumer credit outcomes. It uses the 2018 Merrimack Valley natural gas explosions as a quasi-random natural experiment and shows that the explosions had a temporary negative effect on debt balances, credit...

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...