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...

Overdrafts have been an ongoing concern of policymakers, and they are one of the main issues being considered for prepaid card rules that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) is currently drafting. Despite regulatory interventions and heated debate between proponents and opponents of...

Anecdotally, a negative relationship between the use of debit cards and credit scores has been reported: Consumers with lower credit scores use debit cards more intensively than those with higher credit scores. However, it is not clear whether credit scores have real effects on consumer payment...

This paper presents models that explain why merchants accept payment cards even when the fees they face exceed the transactional benefits they receive from a card transaction. Such merchant behaviors can be explained by competition among merchants and/or the effectiveness of the merchant’s...

Card payments have been growing very rapidly. To continue the growth, payment card networks keep adding new merchants and card issuers try to stimulate their existing customers’ card usage by providing rewards. This paper seeks to analyze the effects of payment card rewards programs on...

This paper examines how competition among payment card networks three-party scheme networks and four-party scheme networks affects pricing as well as the welfare of various parties. A competing network has an incentive to provide rewards to its card users. By providing more generous rewards than...

It has been three years since we published A Guide to the ATM and Debit Card Industry. Those three years represent a very dynamic time in the industry with a number of important developments. Some trends and patterns have persisted or accelerated, while others have peaked or reversed. Still...

This paper investigates potential market forces that cause payment card rewards even when providing payment card rewards is not the most efficient. Three factors-oligopolistic merchants, output-maximizing card networks, and the merchant's inability to set different prices across payment...

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...

This paper considers possible public policies that could improve efficiency and welfare distribution in the U.S. retail payments industry. Mainly, four options, i) encouraging competition; ii) allowing merchants to surcharge; iii) regulating merchant fees; and iv) regulating payment card rewards,...