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Report
Financial inclusion and consumer payment choice
This report examines similarities and differences among three groups of consumers: those without a checking or savings account (unbanked), bank account adopters who have used alternative financial services (AFS) in the past 12 months (underbanked), and bank account adopters who did not use AFS in the past 12 months (fully banked). Consumers in the three groups have different demographic characteristics, income, and payment behaviors: ?The payment behavior of the underbanked is similar to that of the fully banked. ?Unbanked consumers make fewer payments per month than the fully banked and the ...
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How do people pay rent?
Using data from the 2014 Boston Fed Bill Payment Experiment and the 2014 Survey of Consumer Payment Choice (SCPC), we investigate how households pay their rent. We find that the dominant methods for paying rent are cash (22 percent), check (42 percent), and money order (16 percent). Electronic methods are still rarely used, at 8 percent for bank account number payment and 7 percent for online banking bill payment, and less than 2 percent for debit and credit cards. Compared with other large bill payments of more than $200, rental payments are much more likely to be made with paper-based ...
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Consumers' use of overdraft protection
In mid-2010, an amendment was passed to Regulation E, which implements the Electronic Fund Transfer Act, requiring financial institutions to ask consumers whether or not they want overdraft protection for automated teller machine (ATM) transactions and everyday purchases made with a debit card. This Research Data Report studies the short-term impact of this amendment by examining consumers? adoption of overdraft protection, the incidence of overdrawing at least once within a 12-month period, and the incidence of paying a fee for overdrawing, before and after the opt-in rule took effect.
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The 2012 diary of consumer payment choice
This paper describes the results, content, and methodology of the 2012 Diary of Consumer Payment Choice (DCPC), the first edition of a survey that measures payment behavior through the daily recording of U.S. consumers? spending by type of payment instrument. A diary makes it possible to collect detailed information on individual payments, including dollar amount, device (if any) used to make the payment (computer, mobile phone, etc.), and payee type (business, person, government). This edition of the DCPC included about 2,500 participants and was conducted in October 2012. During that month, ...
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Battery order effects on relative ratings in Likert scales
Likert-scale batteries, sequences of questions with the same ordinal response choices, are often used in surveys to collect information about attitudes on a related set of topics. Analysis of such data often focuses on the study of relative ratings or the likelihood that one item is given a lower (or higher) rating than another item. This work studies how different orderings of the items within a battery and, in particular, the relative location of items affect relative rating distributions. We take advantage of data from the 2012?2014 Survey of Consumer Payment Surveys, in which item order ...
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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. ...
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Estimating population means in the 2012 Survey of Consumer Payment Choice
This report examines the effect of adding to a longitudinal panel on estimates of population parameters in the 2012 Survey of Consumer Payment Choice (SCPC) more than 1,000 newly recruited respondents specifically targeted to fill segments of the U.S. population that tend to be underbanked and underrepresented in the longitudinal panel. In many ways, the new respondents have fundamentally different characteristics from the ongoing respondents. To minimize confounding sources of change to annual estimates when making comparisons across years, the official 2012 SCPC publication was based on the ...
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U.S. consumers' holdings and use of $100 bills
Conventional wisdom asserts that $100 bills are often associated with crime and foreign cash holdings, leading some commentators to call for their elimination; in light of this proposal, it is useful to examine the legal, domestic use of cash. This report uses new data from the 2012 Diary of Consumer Payment Choice (DCPC) to evaluate consumer use of $100 bills as a means of payment.
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The 2013 Survey of Consumer Payment Choice: technical appendix
This report serves as the technical appendix to the 2013 Survey of Consumer Payment Choice. The Survey of Consumer Payment Choice (SCPC) is an annual study, conducted since 2008 through a partnership between the Consumer Payments Research Center (CPRC) at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston and the RAND Corporation, designed primarily to collect data on attitudes to and use of various payment instruments by consumers over the age of 18 in the United States. This data report details the technical aspects of the survey design, implementation, and analysis.
Report
The 2014 survey of consumer payment choice: summary results
In 2014, the average number of U.S. consumer payments per consumer per month decreased to 66.1, in a statistically insignificant decline from 67.9 in 2013. The number of payments made by paper check continued to decline, falling by 0.7 to 5.0 checks per month, while the number of electronic payments (online banking bill payments, bank account number payments, and deductions from income) increased by 0.6 to 6.9 of these payments per month. The monthly shares of debit cards (31.1 percent), cash (25.6 percent), and credit cards (23.3 percent) continued to be largest; while the share of ...