U.S. Federal regulation from 2009 requires credit card companies to convey information regarding payoff scenarios, i.e., details such as total amount paid and time to pay off when only a minimum payment is made (over time). Across seven studies, the present research shows that consumers who were...

Contact Solutions LLC provides third-party contact center support for a number of government-sponsored prepaid card programs, including U.S. Treasury's Direct Express. One of the explicit objectives of these programs is to link previously unbanked individuals with access to electronic banking...

Consumer protection in financial markets in the form of information disclosure is high on government agendas, despite the fact that the empirical evidence on its effectiveness is limited. To measure the impact of Truth-in-Lending-Act- type disclosures on default and indebtedness, as well as of...

Do consumers and merchants use the most efficient payment instruments? I examine how inter-change fees, which are fees paid from merchants' banks to consumers' banks when card transactions take place, influence the choice between cash and payment cards. I show that when consumers do not pay...

The demand for Islamic banking in Malaysia is increasing as well as Islamic product. For instance, the demand for Islamic credit card (known as credit card-i) is rapidly growth as an alternative to replace the current conventional credit card. However, the current practice of Islamic concept has...

It has been long recognized that cash plays a critical role in fueling street crime due to its liquidity and transactional anonymity. In poor neighborhoods where street offenses are concentrated, a significant source of circulating cash stems from public assistance or welfare payments. In the...

We analyze the interactions between two different forms of unsecured credit and their implications for default behavior of young U.S. households. One type of credit mimics credit cards in the United States and the default option resembles a bankruptcy filing under Chapter 7; the other type of...

Prepaid cards are the most rapidly growing payment instrument. General purpose reloadable (GPR) prepaid cards, in particular, have gained considerable traction especially among the unbanked and underbanked. How these cards are used is now of acute interest to both policymakers, seeking to ensure...

Two-sided payment card markets generate costs that have to be distributed among the participating actors. For this purpose, payment card networks set an interchange fee, which is the fee paid by the merchant's bank to the cardholder's bank per transaction. While in recent years many antitrust...

In the last few years, store gift certificates have matured into a diverse set of products including "open loop" prepaid cards capable of providing services traditionally reserved to banks. At the same time, tighter regulations on banks have raised the cost of bank accounts and driven many out...