Today's consumer has access to more payment instruments than consumers of just a few years ago, as newer electronic payments are penetrating an established payments market, while older methods, such as cash and checks, remain important payment alternatives. As the number of available payment...

Consumer payments in the United States gradually have been shifting away from paper checks for the past several years. Cash use has declined as well, although at a much slower pace. As the number of check payments has decreased, those payments have been replaced with electronic and card...

We measure consumers' readiness to face emergency expenses. Based on data from a representative survey of US consumers, we find that financial readiness varies widely across consumers, with lowest-income, least-educated, unemployed, and black consumers most likely to have $0 saved for emergency...

We estimate a two-stage Heckman selection model of credit card adoption and use with a unique dataset that combines administrative data from the Equifax credit bureau and self-reported data from the Survey of Consumer Payment Choice, a representative survey of US consumers. Even though the...

Approximately half of credit card holders in the United States regularly carry unpaid credit card debt. These so-called "revolvers" exhibit payment behavior that differs from that of those who repay their entire credit card balance every month. Previous literature has focused on the adoption of...

Since the mid-1990s, the U.S. payment system has been undergoing a transformation featuring a significant decline in the use of paper checks that has been quite uneven across consumers and not well understood. This paper estimates econometric models of consumers’ adoption (extensive margin)...

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 seeks to discover whether U.S. merchants are using their recently granted freedom to offer price discounts and other incentives to steer customers to pay with methods that are less costly to merchants. Using evidence of merchant steering based on the 2012 Diary of Consumer Payment...

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused large changes in consumer spending, including how people make their payments. We use data from a nationally representative survey of U.S. consumers collected before COVID in 2018 and 2019 and during COVID in 2020 to analyze changes in consumer payment behavior...