Search Results
Report
Consumers and Mobile Finance Services 2015
Mobile phones have increasingly become tools that consumers use for banking, payments, budgeting, and shopping. Given the rapid pace of developments in the area of mobile finance, the Federal Reserve Board began conducting annual surveys of consumers’ use of mobile financial services in 2011. The survey examines trends in the adoption and use of mobile banking, payments, and shopping behavior and how the emergence of mobile financial services affects consumers’ interaction with financial institutions. This report presents findings from the 2014 survey, fielded in December, which focused ...
Report
Consumers and Mobile Financial Services 2015
Mobile phones have increasingly become tools that consumers use for banking, payments, budgeting, and shopping. Given the rapid pace of developments in the area of mobile finance, the Federal Reserve Board began conducting annual surveys of consumers’ use of mobile financial services in 2011. The survey examines trends in the adoption and use of mobile banking, payments, and shopping behavior and how the emergence of mobile financial services affects consumers’ interaction with financial institutions. This report presents findings from the 2014 survey, fielded in December, which focused ...
Report
Report on the Economic Well-Being of U.S. Households in 2013
Many households in the United States have been tested by the Great Recession. Large-scale financial strain at the household level ultimately fed into broader economic challenges for the country, and the completion of the national recovery will ultimately be, in part, a reflection of the well-being of households and consumers. Because households’ finances can change at a rapid pace and new opportunities and risks may emerge, such recovery can be complex to monitor. To better understand the financial state of U.S. households, the Federal Reserve Board conducted a new consumer survey, the ...
Report
Consumers and Mobile Financial Services 2016
Mobile phones have increasingly become tools that consumers use for banking, payments, budgeting, and shopping. Given the rapid pace of developments in the area of mobile finance, the Federal Reserve Board began conducting annual surveys of consumers’ use of mobile financial services in 2011. The survey examines trends in the adoption and use of mobile banking, payments, and shopping behavior and how the emergence of mobile financial services affects consumers’ interaction with financial institutions. This report presents findings from the 2014 survey, fielded in December, which focused ...
Working Paper
Are Central Cities Poor and Non-White?
For much of the 20th century, America's central cities were viewed as synonymous with economic and social hardship, often used as proxy for low-income communities of color. Since the 1990s, however, many metropolitan areas have seen a resurgence of interest in central city neighborhoods. Theoretical models of income sorting lead to ambiguous predictions about where households of different income levels will live within metropolitan areas. In this paper, we explore intra-city spatial patterns of income and race for U.S. metropolitan areas, focusing particularly on the locations of low-income ...
Discussion Paper
Mobile Banking : A Closer Look at Survey Measures
This note presents new estimates of mobile banking use in 2017, as well as insights on types of users and their behaviors.
Journal Article
Designing disclosures to inform consumer financial decisionmaking: lessons learned from consumer testing
The Federal Reserve Board has studied ways to improve the disclosures that consumers draw on when they purchase and use financial products and services. This article examines lessons learned from the Board's consumer testing projects, suggests potential best practices for disclosure content and presentation, and identifies challenges involved in crafting effective disclosures for financial products.
Journal Article
Asset Holdings of Young Households: Trends and Patterns
The authors use multiple waves of the triennial Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF) from 1989 to 2013 to examine the composition of the asset portfolios of young households whose head of household is between 18 and 41 years of age. The focus is on households? decisions to hold different types of assets, including both financial assets (e.g., bank accounts, stocks, and retirement accounts) and nonfinancial assets (e.g., residential real estate, businesses, and automobiles). The authors describe the patterns of acquisition of broad asset categories in the early part of the life cycle with ...
Report
Has COVID Changed Consumer Payment Behavior?
The COVID-19 pandemic has caused large changes in consumer spending, including how people make their payments. We use data from a nationally representative survey of US consumers collected before the pandemic in 2018 and 2019 and in 2020 to analyze changes in consumer payment behavior during the pandemic. We find that compared with their payment behavior in 2019, consumers had shifted some of their purchases from in person to online by fall 2020, significantly lowered their use of cash for purchases, and shifted their person-to-person (P2P) payments away from paper (cash and checks). Those ...
Working Paper
Has COVID Changed Consumer Payment Behavior?
The COVID-19 pandemic has caused large changes in consumer spending, including how people make their payments. We use data from a nationally representative survey of U.S. consumers collected before COVID in 2018 and 2019 and during COVID in 2020 to analyze changes in consumer payment behavior during the pandemic. We find that compared with their payment behavior in 2019, consumers had shifted some of their purchases from in person to online by fall 2020, significantly lowered their use of cash for purchases, and shifted their person-to-person (P2P) payments away from paper (cash and checks). ...