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Discussion Paper
Who gains and who loses from credit card payments?: theory and calibrations
Merchant fees and reward programs generate an implicit monetary transfer to credit card users from non-card (or ?cash?) users because merchants generally do not set differential prices for card users to recoup the costs of fees and rewards. On average, each cash-using household pays $151 to card-using households and each card-using household receives $1,482 from cash users every year. Because credit card spending and rewards are positively correlated with household income, the payment instrument transfer also induces a regressive transfer from low-income to high-income households in general. ...
Journal Article
An evaluation of recent macroeconomic forecast errors
Despite a significant decline in the pace of economic growth in the second half of 2000, macroeconomic forecasters underpredicted real GDP growth and overpredicted the unemployment rate by a significant amount, for the fifth consecutive year. On average, real GDP forecasts were about 2 percentage points below the actual data for the 1996-2000 period, and unemployment rate forecasts about 0.5 percentage point above. On a more positive note, forecasters ended their chronic overprediction of inflation during much of this period. Nevertheless, surprisingly large and persistent errors in recent ...
Conference Paper
Beyond shocks: what causes business cycles?
Working Paper
Measuring consumer expenditures with payment diaries
As the 2012 Diary of Consumer Payment Choice (DCPC) illustrates, there are advantages to measuring consumer expenditures by tracking the authorization of payments by instrument type (cash, check, debit or credit card, etc.). The main advantages of payment diaries appear to be the following: 1) the ability to measure expenditures by payment instrument aggregated into lumpy purchases (?shopping baskets?), 2) relatively low respondent burden, and 3) effective random sampling. Three notable results emerge from comparing the 2012 DCPC estimates with estimates from other reputable estimates of the ...
Report
The 2010 Survey of Consumer Payment Choice
In 2010, the number of consumer payments increased nearly 9 percent from 2009 as economic activity began to rebound from the financial crisis and recession. Cash payments by consumers, which had increased sharply in 2009, did not fall back but rather grew another 3 percent in 2010. However, the share of cash payments, the dollar amount of cash withdrawals, and cash holdings by consumers decreased moderately in 2010. Credit card payments by consumers increased 15 percent, reversing more than half the 2009 decline, and the steady trend decline in paper check payments by consumers continued. ...
Report
The 2010 Survey of Consumer Payment Choice: Summary Results
In 2010, the number of consumer payments increased nearly 9 percent from 2009 as economic activity began to rebound from the financial crisis and recession. Cash payments by consumers, which had increased sharply in 2009, did not fall back but rather grew another 3 percent in 2010. However, the share of cash payments, the dollar amount of cash withdrawals, and cash holdings by consumers decreased moderately in 2010. Credit card payments by consumers increased 15 percent, reversing more than half the 2009 decline, and the steady trend decline in paper check payments by consumers continued. ...
Discussion Paper
Consumer behavior and payment choice : 2006 conference summary
This paper summarizes the proceedings of the second Consumer Behavior and Payment Choice conference, held at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston on July 25?27, 2006. These conferences are unique in featuring the collaboration of two groups of payments experts ? the private-sector payments industry on the one hand, and the academic, research, and policymaking communities on the other ? to stimulate more research and understanding of consumer payment behavior. The central focus of this second conference was learning more about the numerous consumer payments data sources that are available ? but ...
Journal Article
Beyond shocks: what causes business cycles? an overview
What makes economies rise and fall? What caused the Asian crisis, the recessions of the 1970's and 1980's, and even the Great Depression? According to many modern economists, shocks did. This unsatisfying answer lies at the heart of a currently popular framework for analyzing business cycle fluctuations. This framework assumes that the macroeconomy usually obeys simple behavioral relationships but is occasionally disrupted by large "shocks", which force it temporarily away from these relationships and into recession. The behavioral relationships then guide the orderly recovery of the ...
Report
The 2015 Survey of Consumer Payment Choice: summary results
The 2015 Survey of Consumer Payment Choice (SCPC) was implemented using a new longitudinal panel, the Understanding America Study (UAS), and results are not yet comparable to the 2008?2014 SCPC. In 2015, U.S. consumers made 68.9 payments per month. Debit cards remained the most popular payment instrument among U.S. consumers in 2015, accounting for 32.5 percent of their monthly payments, followed by cash (27.1 percent) and credit or charge cards (21.3 percent). For nonbills, consumers used cash and debit equally?about one-third of the time for each. For bills, consumers used payment cards for ...
Working Paper
Why are (some) consumers (finally) writing fewer checks?: the role of payment characteristics
Since the mid-1990s, the U.S. payment system has been undergoing a transformation featuring a significant decline in the use of paper checks that has been quite uneven across consumers and not well understood. This paper estimates econometric models of consumers? adoption (extensive margin) and use (intensive margin) of checks plus six other common U.S. payment instruments, using a comprehensive new data source on consumer payment choice. We find that payment characteristics are the most important determinants of payment instrument use. Plausible changes in the relative convenience and cost ...