Die Digitalisierung hat neben Kreditkarten auch unterschiedliche Bezahlsysteme möglich gemacht. Mittlerweile sind diese neuen Systeme auf dem Weg, das Bargeld abzulösen. Tatsächlich gibt es aus der Wissenschaft sogar Empfehlungen, das Bargeld ganz abzuschaffen. Die Autoren des Zeitgesprächs...

What makes e-money more special than cash? Is the introduction of e-money necessarily welfare enhancing? Is an e-money system necessarily stable? What is the optimal way to design an efficient and stable e-money scheme? This paper provides a first attempt to develop a micro-founded, dynamic,...

U.S. consumers' demand for cash is estimated with new panel micro data for 2008-2010 using econometric methodology similar to Mulligan and Sala-i-Martin (2000); Attanasio, Guiso, and Jappelli (2002); and Lippi and Secchi (2009). We extend the Baumol-Tobin model to allow for credit card payments...

Recent years have witnessed the advances of e-money systems such as Bitcoin, PayPal and various forms of stored-value cards. This paper adopts a mechanism design approach to identify some essential features of different payment systems that implement and improve the constrained optimal resource...

This paper focuses on the value of consumer payments made with cash, which we refer to as “total cash spending”, and the share of total spending that is made with cash, which we refer to as the “cash-spending share”. We provide estimates of these measures of cash use for 2000-2011 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...

Retail payment systems continue to become faster and more convenient. Yet, despite increased use of electronic payments around the world, there is scant evidence of a shift away from cash. As the appetite for cash remains unabated, few societies are close to “cashless” or even...

Providing bank notes is one of the Bank of Canada’s core functions. The Bank is therefore interested in whether cash is adequately distributed across society, and this also influences the Bank’s thinking on issuing a central bank digital currency. We provide a perspective on these issues by...

This paper investigates the way in which the COVID-19 pandemic has changed an important aspect of everyday life, viz. how people make payments. The empirical study is based on a survey of over 5,000 respondents from 22 European countries. It shows that consumers who had been making cashless...

The emergence of cashless stores has led several cities and states to ban such stores. This article investigates this issue by characterizing consumers who pay cash for in-person purchases and consumers who do not have credit or debit cards. Using a random utility model, I estimate 1.3 to 30.9...