The Credit CARD Act of 2009 was intended to prevent practices in the credit card industry that lawmakers viewed as deceptive and abusive. Among other changes, the Act restricted issuers' account closure policies, eliminated certain fees, and made it more difficult for issuers to change terms on...

The Federal Reserve Financial Services Strategic Plan for 2012 - 2016 specifies five main policy goals for the next few years. The second of its goals is to "Maintain public confidence in the end-to-end safety and security of clearing and settlement systems." Indeed, in each annual Survey of...

This paper seeks to discover whether U.S. merchants are using their recently granted freedom to offer price discounts and other incentives to steer customers to pay with methods that are less costly to merchants. Using evidence of merchant steering based on the 2012 Diary of Consumer Payment...

Credit card delinquencies and personal bankruptcy rates increased during the mid 1990s, despite the strength of the U.S. economy. Even though per capita income rose during that period, household borrowing grew at an even faster pace. The rise in revolving debt-mainly credit card loans-was...

Predictions about a cashless and checkless society have been made for many years, but retail payments transactions made with electronic payment instruments still constitute only a small fraction of all payments made in the United States. This is the case despite differences in cost and despite...

Supply and demand functions are typically estimated using uniform prices and quantities across products, but where products are heterogeneous, it is important to consider quality differences explicitly. This paper demonstrates a new approach to doing this by employing hedonic coefficients to...

Since the mid-1990s, the U.S. payment system has been undergoing a transformation featuring a significant decline in the use of paper checks that has been quite uneven across consumers and not well understood. This paper estimates econometric models of consumers’ adoption (extensive margin)...

Because the automated clearinghouse (ACH) has been found to have lower social costs than paper checks, the Federal Reserve has been promoting more widespread use of ACH by lowering ACH processing fees. In this paper we have obtained the first numerical estimates of ACH demand elasticities, a...

One reason the U.S. has been slow to move from paper checks to electronic payments is that the benefits for individual users are less than for the payments system as a whole.