The paper looks at the National Bank of Romania’s issue of banknotes from 1880 through 1914, highlighting the developments in the notes’ cover, the channels whereby the central bank put its notes into circulation, as well as the behaviour of the issuing house during episodes of crisis. The...

This paper focuses on the value of consumer payments made with cash, which we refer to as “total cash spending”, and the share of total spending that is made with cash, which we refer to as the “cash-spending share”. We provide estimates of these measures of cash use for 2000-2011 and...

Purpose: This study quantifies the impact of the Dutch cash payment system on the environment and on climate change using a life cycle assessment (LCA). It examines both the impact of coins and of banknotes. In addition, it identifies areas within the cash payment system where the impact on the...

The Covid-19 pandemic has been a shock to retail payment behaviour. How have the changes differed across countries? What do they imply for the future of cash and digital payments? We assemble a new “Future of Payments” database on retail payment behaviour for up to 95 countries over...

The Covid-19 pandemic has been a shock to retail payment behaviour. How have the changes differed across countries? What do they imply for the future of cash and digital payments? We assemble a new "Future of Payments" database on retail payment behaviour for up to 95 countries over September...

Payments are a key focus of central banks, as - together with the safe, efficient operation of the payments market - wide access to cash is fundamentally important for a healthy economy. In this study, three main research areas were investigated: 1. socioeconomic characteristics that can be...

One of the most important results of theoretical research on currency systems is that spacing denominations apart by a factor of two is better than a factor of three as this lowers the average number of notes and coins exchanged in transactions. These theoretical studies also claim that an...

Money creation began before the loan activities of the goldsmith-bankers in seventeenth-century London, in the form of coin clipping, coin debasement, and so on. However, money creation as we know it today (new bank loans create new bank deposits, which is the dominant means of payments) began...

This paper investigates the way in which the COVID-19 pandemic has changed an important aspect of everyday life, viz. how people make payments. The empirical study is based on a survey of over 5,000 respondents from 22 European countries. It shows that consumers who had been making cashless...

The Central Bank of Malta conducted a survey with the purpose of examining cash usage and preferred payment methods in Malta. Furthermore, the study investigated the perceptions of the Maltese public on Euro banknotes and coins. The results gathered from this survey have been analysed and are...