Despite the central role of payments in theoretical and policy oriented economics, there is surprisingly little known about the costs of different payment instruments. We estimate social and private costs of cash, debit and credit card payments in Sweden in 2002. The combined social cost of...

We estimate the social and private costs of consumer-to-business payments in Sweden in 2009. The combined social cost for these payments was 0.68 per cent of GDP. At the point of sale, cash is socially less costly than debit cards for payments below EUR 1.88 (SEK 20) and credit cards below EUR...

The document contains a commentary on the wider issues of responsibility raised by the collapse of First Solution Money Transfer. This was a UK based private limited company which provided a money transfer service, providing expatriates the facilities to transfer money back to their family in...

Headquartered in Utrecht/The Netherlands with subsidiaries in Germany, Italy and Finland, Equens is a full-service payment processing company offering services in payment and card processing and a European leader in this business segment. The transformation of Equens N.V. into an SE was...

This paper finds declining consumption expenditure between paydays, for a typical household in the working population of the UK. The magnitude is inconsistent with exponential time preference, but compatible with quasi-hyperbolic discounting. However, the hyperbolic model predicts that credit...

Using our updated model of the payment exchange system within the banking industry, we have introduced sudden local economic shocks and calculated their effect on the stability of the financial system. Our results suggest that the probability of a total banking failure, i.e., the systemic risk...

Germans are still very fond of using cash. Of all direct payment transactions, cash accounts for an astounding 82% in terms of number, and for 58% in terms of value. With a new and unique dataset that combines transaction information with survey data on payment behaviour of German consumers, we...

In this paper we analyse whether the recording behaviour of consumers keeping a payment diary changes over the diary period. Using data from a large study on the payment behaviour of German consumers we find that individuals tend to report a higher number of transactions on the first day of the...

While net settlement systems make more efficient use of liquidity than gross settlement systems, they are known to generate systemic risk. What does that tendency imply for the stability of the payments [or financial] system when the two settlement systems coexist? Do liquidity shortages induce...