Retail payment systems continue to become faster and more convenient. Yet, despite increased use of electronic payments around the world, there is scant evidence of a shift away from cash. As the appetite for cash remains unabated, few societies are close to “cashless” or even...

This paper describes key results from the 2016 Diary of Consumer Payment Choice (DCPC), the third in a series of diary surveys that measure payment behavior through the daily recording of U.S. consumers' spending. In October 2016, consumers paid mostly with cash (31 percent of payments), debit...

Providing bank notes is one of the Bank of Canada’s core functions. The Bank is therefore interested in whether cash is adequately distributed across society, and this also influences the Bank’s thinking on issuing a central bank digital currency. We provide a perspective on these issues by...

Krivosheya (2020) finds that consumers’ use of financial innovations has a positive effect on the frequency with which they use a payment card at the point of sale. This comment argues that Krivosheya’s results are a case of ‘correlation does not imply causation’

Abstract – In this article we describe the trials and tribulations in the early stages to introduce cashless retail payments in the USA. We compare efforts by financial service firms and retailers. We then document the ephemeral life of one of these innovations, colloquially known as “Hinky...

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...

Distributed ledger technology (DLT) enables a wide range of innovative industrial use cases and business models, such as through programmable payments and the seamless exchange of assets, goods, and services. To exploit the full potential of a DLT-based European economy, it is crucial to...

The emergence of cashless stores has led several cities and states to ban such stores. This article investigates this issue by characterizing consumers who pay cash for in-person purchases and consumers who do not have credit or debit cards. Using a random utility model, I estimate 1.3 to 30.9...

The emergence of cashless stores has led several cities and states to ban such stores. This article investigates this policy issue by characterizing consumers who pay cash for in-person purchases and banked and unbanked consumers who do not have credit or debit cards. Using a random utility...

Recent legislation and court settlements in the United States allow merchants to use price discounts to steer customers to pay with means of payment that are less costly to merchants. We use transaction data to compute rough estimates of the expected net cost reduction by merchant type of giving...