The cash paradox

In many industrialized countries, cash usage at points of sale has been decreasing owing to competition from alternative means of payment such as credit cards. At the same time, cash demand, measured as currency in circulation over GDP, fell only in earlier years but has remained surprisingly robust in the past two to three decades. This phenomenon, termed the “cash paradox,” poses a challenge to standard monetary models. We introduce two new features into the standard cash-credit model: the substitutability between cash and credit (as a stand-in for alternative means of payments) is uneven across different economic activities, and some agents actively manage cash flows across these activities. Calibration exercises show that the cash-flow channel is important for quantitatively capturing the diverging trends in cash usage and demand. There is also some empirical support for our model's prediction on cash velocity in the retail sector.