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Report
Merchant steering of consumer payment choice: lessons learned from consumer surveys
Recent policy changes allow merchants to influence consumers? choice of payment instruments by offering price discounts and other incentives. This report describes lessons learned from using consumer survey responses to assess whether merchants tried to influence buyers? choice of payment method. To measure the effects of these recent policy changes, we included questions about merchant steering in pilot versions of a new diary survey of U.S. consumers. Our findings are inconclusive because some respondents interpreted the questions differently from the way we intended. This report aims to ...
Discussion Paper
Adopting, using, and discarding paper and electronic payment instruments: variation by age and race
This paper uses data from the 2008 Survey of Consumer Payment Choice to discuss the adoption, use, and discarding of various common payment instruments. Using a nationally representative sample of individual-level data, it presents evidence in unparalleled detail about how consumers use different payment instruments. Most interestingly, it displays robust evidence of significant age- and race-related differences in payments choices. Among other things, it suggests that the range of payment instruments adopted and regularly used by blacks is narrower than that chosen by whites, presumably ...
Discussion Paper
The 2009 survey of consumer payment choice
This paper presents results of the 2009 Survey of Consumer Payment Choice (SCPC), along with revised 2008 SCPC data. In 2009, the average U.S. consumer held 5.0 of the nine payment instruments available, including cash, and used 3.8 of them during a typical month. Between the 2008 and 2009 surveys, a period that includes the trough of the latest recession, consumers significantly increased their use of cash and close substitutes for cash, such as money orders and prepaid cards. At the same time, consumers reduced their use of credit cards and (to a lesser extent) debit cards, as well as ...
Working Paper
Measuring household spending and payment habits: the role of “typical” and “specific” time frames in survey questions
We designed and fielded an experimental module in the American Life Panel (ALP) where we ask individuals to report the number of their purchases and the amount paid by debit cards, cash, credit cards, and personal checks. The design of the experiment features several stages of randomization. First, three different groups of sample participants are randomly assigned to an entry month (July, August, or September, 2011) and are to be interviewed four times during a year, once every quarter. Second, for each method of payment a sequence of questions elicits spending behavior during a day, week, ...
Working Paper
Imputing household spending in the Panel Study of Income Dynamics: a comparison of approaches
One of the drawbacks of using household surveys to investigate macroeconomic issues has been a lack of a dataset that contains both adequate household expenditure data and comprehensive household wealth and income data. This paper compares alternative methods of imputing household expenditures in the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID)?that of Blundell et al. (2006) and Cooper ( 2009). It also analyzes the additional expenditure questions included in the PSID starting in 1999 and expanded in 2005. The paper finds that the Blundell et al. (2006) method works well for imputing households' ...
Working Paper
Perceptions and Expectations of Inflation by U.S. Households
To better understand inflation expectations, we examine newly available data on U.S. households' inflation perceptions-what people think inflation has been in the past. The overarching summary is that inflation perceptions look similar to inflation expectations. The central tendencies of the responses for perceived inflation over the past five to ten years are similar to those of expected inflation for the next five to ten years, and all are a little above official estimates of inflation. Thus, survey respondents overall do not expect long-term inflation to change in the future relative to ...
Working Paper
Studying consumption with the Panel Study of Income Dynamics: comparisons with the Consumer Expenditure Survey and an application to the intergenerational transmission of well-being
Beginning in 1999, the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) added new questions about several categories of consumption expenditure. The PSID now covers items that constitute more than seventy percent of total expenditure measured in the Consumer Expenditure Survey (CE). We show that expenditure for each of the broad categories in the PSID aligns closely with corresponding measures from the CE. Using the new PSID data, we impute total expenditure in the PSID and show that this is also very close to total measured CE expenditure. For several distinct categories and for total consumption, we ...
Working Paper
Heaping at Round Numbers on Financial Questions : The Role of Satisficing
Survey responses to quantitative financial questions frequently display strong patterns of heaping at round numbers. This paper uses two studies to examine variation in rounding across questions and by individual characteristics. Rounding was more common for respondents low in ability, for respondents low in motivation, and for more difficult questions, all consistent with theories of satisficing. Questions that require more difficult information retrieval and integration of information exhibit more heaping. The use of records, which lowers task difficulty, reduces rounding as well. Higher ...
Journal Article
1958 survey of consumer finances: purchases of durable goods