This paper examines the role of cash usage in the development of payment media. For that purpose, the basic trends of change in payment media are scrutinized using European data. Although cash still clearly dominates in small retail payments, there has been a definite shift towards electronic...

This paper deals with Finnish bankruptcies. It shows that bankruptcies are strongly related to the business cycle and that they are perhaps even more strongly related to indebtedness, real interest rates and asset prices. The importance of these financial factors probably increased when the...

This paper deals with optimal payment systems. The issue boils down to how large are the costs of different payment media, which can be interpreted as a question of the efficiency of the means of payment. However, there are other qualifications related to the choice of payment media. Here, at...

This paper analyzes the use of cash in the Euro area. It attempts to give at least a partial answer to the question of whether cash is predominantly used in the shadow economy and whether, consequently, the behavior of cash balances is useful in monitoring changes in the shadow economy. The...