This paper studies payment variation across locations and time using five years of transactions data from a large discount retail chain with hundreds of stores across the Fifth District. The results show that the median transaction size, demographics, education levels, and state fixed effects...

This paper provides a new theory for two-sided payment card markets. Adopting payment cards requires consumers and merchants to pay a fixed cost, but yields a lower marginal cost of making payments. Analyzing adoption and usage externalities among heterogeneous consumers and merchants, our...