Standard transaction cost arguments can only partially explain why the share of cash transactions is still high in many countries. This paper shows that consumers’ desire to monitor liquidity is one of the reasons. Consumers make use of a distinctive feature of cash – a glance into one’s...

This paper studies preferences for cash versus card payments using household scanner data of up to 18,000 German households from 2009 to 2015. I exploit a unique institutional setting in which virtually all households have access free-of-charges to the same debit card, the girocard, which has...