COVID-19 Pandemic’s Impact on the Shift From Cash to Credit Cards and Mobile Payments by Income Level
Open Access
Author:
Monahan, Matthew
Area of Honors:
Economics
Degree:
Bachelor of Arts
Document Type:
Thesis
Thesis Supervisors:
David Argente, Thesis Supervisor Sung Jae Jun, Thesis Honors Advisor
Keywords:
pandemic covid covid-19 payments payment methods income consumer payment
Abstract:
The coronavirus disease (COVID-19) was declared a pandemic on March 11, 2020 (CDC, 2022). The COVID-19 pandemic has had immense impacts on many different fronts of people’s lives, infecting over 640 million and taking the lives of over six million people worldwide. One aspect of the pandemic that has not been heavily researched is the pandemic’s impact on consumer usage rates of mobile and contactless payments (credit/debit cards), specifically the general shift away from cash in terms of payment methods, as well as what impact income has had on this shift. Prior studies have investigated consumer behavior and its change during the pandemic, the severity of the pandemic’s impact by income level, as well as the topic of cash usage and mobile and contactless payments usage rates.
This paper aims to bridge the gap between the research that has been done regarding cash and cashless payments and the research done regarding the pandemic’s impact on low-income households to see if this general shift away from cash has stronger impacts on some communities when compared to others. In effect, the aim of this paper is to view the shift from cash to credit cards by income level, to see if those individuals in lower-income brackets are transitioning to mobile and contactless payments at rates slower than that of higher-income individuals.
