We examine how an innovation in payment technology impacts on consumer payment choice and cash demand. We study the staggered introduction of contactless debit cards between 2016-2018. The timing of access to the contactless technology is quasi-random across clients, depending only on the expiry...

Using a randomized experiment in the auto lending industry, we provide causal evidence of higher loan profitability and lower default rates with algorithmic machine underwriting, relative to human underwriting. We find that machine-underwritten loans generate 10.2% higher profit than...

This research explores the origins of observed differences in time preference across countries and regions. Exploiting a natural experiment associated with the expansion of suitable crops for cultivation in the course of the Columbian Exchange, the research establishes that pre-industrial...

This chapter provides an overview of how digital technologies are transforming the financial services landscape. We highlight the latest in digital financial product and service offerings related to payments and transfers, savings and investments, borrowing, and risk management. We then consider...

On the basis of empirical data for the Swiss market this paper confirms the hypothesis that the lower direct costs of online trading (brokerage) are cancelled out by higher indirect costs (in the form of information processing costs). In addition, the report provides evidence that during the...

The Bank of Finland’s Finnish Payment Habits 2010 project predicts that Finnish payment habits will face substantial changes. The causes for these changes include: the standardisation and integration of European payment systems, development of payment services-related legislation and...

Our survey found that the Hungarian public considers bank cards to be the most secure electronic payment instrument. The positive perception of the bank card ranks immediately behind the perceived security of traditional payment instruments: the yellow cheque and cash. Nevertheless, one of the...

This paper uses a novel experimental design to study the effect of hypothetical personal experience on the adoption of a new insurance product in rural China. Specifically, we conduct a set of insurance games with a random subset of farmers. Our findings show that playing insurance games...

This paper estimates the effect of contactless payment on the spending ratio in terms of transactions for different transaction types at the point-of-sale. The specific devices that are investigated are debit and credit cards, to which the feature is embedded. Data is drawn from a national...

This paper explores the relationship between risk attitude and asset diversification in household portfolios. We first examine the impact of manifested risk aversion on the total number of distinct assets held in a portfolio (naive diversification). The second part of the paper focuses on a more...