Research on holding and use of cash involves many aspects, such as reasons for holding and hoarding cash, transactional demand for cash, cash management, type of spending paid with cash, type of consumer who pays cash, merchant acceptance, how consumers get cash, currency denominations, legal aspects, cash substitutes, and cost of cash. The purpose of this article is to introduce the reader to some of the research economists do on consumer holding and use of cash.

We design a model with banks of unequal size operating subject to liquidity requirements in an imperfectly-competitive deposit market. We show that large banks have stronger incentives than small ones to lobby in order to relax the liquidity requirements unless they bear significantly higher lobbying costs. Therefore, lobbying magnifies asymmetries between banks. Furthermore, we establish that the organization of influence activities matters. An industry-wide bank association for lobbying to relax the liquidity requirements suffers from an internal conflict of interest and cannot simultaneously benefit both large and small banks if these have identical lobbying cost functions.

Exclusion of borrowers from credit markets became a primary concern for regulators during the recovery from the recent recession. The paper analyzes loan-making institutions that set both interest rates and minimum credit requirements. We propose analytical measures of the degree of borrower exclusion from receiving loans. We analyze five market structures: Single lender, regulated interest rate, entry, interest rate discrimination, and highly-competitive lenders. Interest rate regulation improves total welfare relative to a single lender market. However, entry of a second lender reduces exclusion and generates higher total welfare. In the absence of fixed costs, perfect and Bertrand competition are optimal.

The paper constructs an overlapping generations model to evaluate how different bank rescue plans affect banks’ risk-taking incentives. For a non-competitive banking industry, we find bailout with tax imposed on the old generation or equity bail-in to be efficient policies in the sense that they implement socially optimal risk-taking. In a competitive banking sector, no-bailout implements the socially-optimal risk-taking. Bailout policies financed by a tax imposed on the young generation always induce excessive risk-taking.

This paper explains why payment card networks charge fees that are proportional to the transaction values instead of charging fixed per-transaction fees. We show that, when card networks and merchants both have market power, card networks earn higher profits by charging proportional fees. It is also shown that competition among merchants reduces card networks' gains from using proportional fees relative to fixed per-transaction fees. Merchants are found to earn lower profits under proportional fees, whereas consumer utility and social welfare are higher. Our welfare results are then evaluated with respect to the current regulatory policy debates.

We characterize the profit-maximizing reserves of a commercial bank, and the generated probability of a liquidity crisis, as a function of the penalty imposed by the Central Bank, the probability of depositors' liquidity needs, and the return on outside investment opportunities. We demonstrate that banks do not fully internalize the social cost associated with the bail-out policy if the liquidity needs of individuals are correlated, and that competitive interbank markets will induce banks to raise their reserves under reasonable conditions. The marginal benefits from an interbank market decrease as the correlation between the liquidity shocks of banks increases.

Deposit insurance designs in many countries place a limit on the coverage of deposits in each bank. However, no limits are placed on the number of accounts held with different banks. Therefore, under limited deposit insurance, some consumers open accounts with different banks to achieve higher or full deposit insurance coverage. We compare three regimes of deposit insurance: no deposit insurance, unlimited deposit insurance, and limited deposit insurance. We show that limited deposit insurance weakens competition among banks and reduces total welfare relative to no or unlimited deposit insurance.

This paper provides new insights on consumers payment choice by comparing cost of paying with cash to paying with cards. Our novel method accounts for how much change is received in the form of banknotes and metal coins, assuming that the weight and size of coins are inconvenient to carry. We use the regression discontinuity design approach to estimate the model using the 2013 Bank of Canada Method-of-Payments Survey and find a significant number of cash users who switch to paying with debit or credit cards at transaction values marginally above 5 and 10. We attribute this finding to the burden of receiving coins as change associated with the currency denomination structure. Our proposed methodology is general and can be applied to other countries and institutional details.