The Impact of Retail Payment Innovations on Cash Usage

Ben Fung, Kim Huynh and Leonard Sabetti

Staff Working Papers from Bank of Canada

Abstract: Many predict that innovations in retail payment may render cash obsolete. We investigate this possibility in the context of recent payment innovations such as contactless-credit and stored-value cards. We apply causal inference methods on the 2009 Bank of Canada Method of Payment survey, a representative sample of adult Canadians’ shopping behaviour for retail consumption over a three-day period. We find that using contactless credit cards and stored-value cards lead to a reduction in average cash usage for transactions both in terms of value and volume. Sensitivity analysis is undertaken and our estimates are robust to hidden bias.

Keywords: Econometric and statistical methods; Financial services; Payment clearing and settlement systems (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C35 C83 E41 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 34 pages
Date: 2012
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ban and nep-mac
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (39)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bca:bocawp:12-14

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