Payments are increasingly being made with payment cards rather than currency - this despite the fact that the operational cost of clearing a card payment usually exceeds the cost of transferring cash. In this paper, the authors examine this puzzle through the lens of monetary theory. They...

Though checks' popularity is now waning in favor of electronic payments, checks were, for much of the twentieth century, the most widely used noncash payment method in the United States. How did such a relatively inefficient form of payment become so dominant? This article traces the historical...

A controversial aspect of payment cards has been the “no-surcharge rule.” This rule, which is part of the contract between the card provider and a merchant, states that the merchant cannot charge a customer who pays by card more than a customer who pays by cash. In this paper we consider the...

Though checks' popularity is now waning in favor of electronic payments, checks were, for much of the twentieth century, the most widely used noncash payment method in the United States. How did such a relatively inefficient form of payment become so dominant? This article traces the historical...