Over millennia, mankind has used hard cash in various forms ranging from shells to gold coins and paper. More recently, cash has become unpopular in political circles, as it effectively restricts states’ power to tax (explicitly or via negative interest rates) or to survey and potentially...

This paper explores the relationship between innovations in payment systems and financial intermediation. By focusing on excess reserves and the currency demand, we provide evidence on the extant transmission mechanism. In this direction, we applied the generalized method of moments (GMM) and...