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We survey banks to construct national estimates of total noncash payments by type, payments fraud and related information. The survey is designed to create aggregate total estimates of all payments in the United States using data from responses returned by a representative, random sample. In 2016, the number of questions in the survey doubled compared with the previous survey, raising serious concerns of smaller bank nonparticipation. To obtain sufficient response data for all questions from smaller banks, we administered a modified survey design which, in addition to randomly sampling banks, also randomly assigned one of several survey forms, subsets of the full survey. This case study illustrates that while several other factors influenced response outcomes, the approach helped ensure sufficient response for smaller banks. Using such an approach may be especially important in an optional-participation survey, when reducing costs to respondents may affect success, or when imputation of unplanned missing items is already needed for estimation. While a variety of factors affected the outcome, we find that the planned missing data approach improved response outcomes for smaller banks. The planned missing item design should be considered as a way of reducing survey burden or increasing unit-level and item-level responses for individual respondents without reducing the full set of survey items collected.

This chapter examines the debt aversion of a group of college students who have the opportunity to take out a sizable, low-interest, non-credit dependent loan. If the loan is simply invested in low-risk assets, it would effectively yield a free lunch in net interest earnings.

The research uses survey data to examine demographic, socio-economic, personality traits, and other characteristics of those willing and unwilling to accept the loan offer, as well as their intentions of early repayment.

Individuals willing to accept the loan tend to have prior debt, longer planning horizons, come from middle-income families, and may have higher cognitive ability. Anticipated early repayment of the loan is more likely among those with prior investments, no prior debt, from STEM majors, with upper income parents, and those who expect to buy a home soon.

We find no consistent relationships between debt aversion and intellectual ability or gender, but this finding may be hampered by our small sample of female loan-rejecters. Our limited sample size also precludes examining interactions between the dimensions of personality types.

We suggest consideration of policies to encourage “smart” borrowing, focusing on the financially disadvantaged, particularly for education loans. This study examines a uniquely occurring natural experiment regarding the opportunity to accept a non-credit dependent loan. Our results describe the behavior of young adults, an infrequently studied yet important segment of the population, especially in the context of borrowing behavior.

This paper argues that the assumption of a homogeneous workforce, which is implicitly invoked in the decomposition analysis of changes in welfare indicators, hides the role that schooling and its returns may have on the understanding of these changes. Using Peruvian cross-sectional data for a period of 10 years (2004–2013) and counterfactual simulations, this paper finds that the main factor contributing to poverty reduction has been individuals’ changes in labor earnings, and the role of these changes has been less important in reducing income inequality. The main driving force of reduced income inequality has been the fall in returns to education, which at the same time has been one of the important factors to constraining the period’s remarkable progress in poverty reduction and expansion of the middle class.

Social enterprises are becoming more and more important for social inclusion and reduction of poverty. Many countries world-wide have accumulated valuable experience in organization of social entrepreneurship and finding innovative approaches which are also analyzed by academic researchers and discussed on international level. Aim: To identify the specific value segments among consumers of Latvian social enterprise products and services in order to provide practical recommendations for implementation of consumer-focused marketing strategies and more effective communication patterns based on an in-depth understanding of the values within the target audience. Methods: The analysis of previous conducted research and scientific publications, analysis of social enterprise consumer survey results, for survey data analysis are applied analysis of descriptive statistics indicators of central tendency or location – arithmetic mean, mode, median, indicators of variability or dispersion – range, standard deviation, standard error of mean and cluster analysis. Results – The results of this study provided detailed descriptions of the respective segments from the demographic point of view, outlined their shopping behavior, preferences for information channels, which altogether form a comprehensive set of practical recommendations for Latvian social enterprises for more effective communication with consumers as well as for public authorities looking to increase the awareness about social entrepreneurship within Latvian society. Implications: The possible applications of research results for organization of work of social enterprises including application of digital marketing. Originality of This Chapter: Since the academic research has only relatively recently started paying attention to the specific marketing aspects of social entrepreneurship, this innovative study contributes to a persistently growing and valuable body of literature which will serve as a guideline for both social enterprises as well as public authorities seeking to find more effective communication strategies.

The authors examine whether or not applicants and recipients of federal disability insurance (DI) inflate their self-assessed health (SAH) problems relative to others. To do this, the authors employ a technique which uses anchoring vignettes. This approach allows them to examine how various cohorts of the population interpret survey questions associated with subjective self-assessments of health. The results of the analysis suggest that DI participants do inflate the severity of a given health problem, but by a small but significant degree. This tendency to exaggerate the severity of disability problems is much more apparent among those with more education (especially those with a college degree). In contrast, racial minorities tend to underestimate severity ratings for a given disability vignette when compared to their white peers.

For central banks who study the use of cash, acceptance of card payments is an important factor. Surveys to measure levels of card acceptance and the costs of payments can be complicated and expensive. In this paper, we exploit a novel data set from Hungary to see the effect of stratified random sampling on estimates of payment card acceptance and usage. Using the Online Cashier Registry, a database linking the universe of merchant cash registers in Hungary, we create merchant and transaction level data sets. We compare county (geographic), industry and store size stratifications to simulate the usual stratification criteria for merchant surveys and see the effect on estimates of card acceptance for different sample sizes. Further, we estimate logistic regression models of card acceptance/usage to see how stratification biases estimates of key determinants of card acceptance/usage.

Rapid innovation and developments in personal electronic technology have encouraged users to change users' devices more frequently than ever, which has resulted in creating a massive increase in the amount of electronic waste. The study focuses on identifying the barriers to closed-loop supply chain (CLSC) in the electronic industry.

A framework for analyzing the relationships among CLSC adoption barriers is designed. The authors adopted the decision-making trial and evaluation laboratory (DEMATEL) technique to determine the critical barriers of electronic CLSC from the opinion of experts in the field.

The outcome from the analysis suggests that cost barriers, financial barrier, process barriers and supplier-side barriers are the main causal factors that prevent the adoption and implementation of e-waste CLSC. The causal relationship indicates that financial barrier is the most influential factor, while phycological barrier is the most flexible barrier to the adoption of e-waste CLSC.

This study is restricted to CLSC adoption barriers in the electronic industry by evaluating 36 sub-barriers grouped into 8 main dimensions related to different members of the supply chain.

Closed-loop adoption barriers have been proposed to understand the crucial barriers to implementation of CLSC in the electronic industry. The cause-and-effect relationship indicates the critical factors to be improved to increase adoption of e-waste CLSC, helping managers and regulatory bodies to mitigate the problem areas.

This study contributes to the literature on CLSC by adopting a multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) technique which captures the critical barriers of e-waste CLSC adoption in Indian scenario.

This paper aims to offer a tutorial/introduction to new statistics arising from the theory of optimal transport to empirical researchers in econometrics and machine learning.

Presenting in a tutorial/survey lecture style to help practitioners with the theoretical material.

The tutorial survey of some main statistical tools (arising from optimal transport theory) should help practitioners to understand the theoretical background in order to conduct empirical research meaningfully.

This study is an original presentation useful for new comers to the field.

The purpose of this study is to examine the effect of social support, healthy life expectancy, freedom to make life choices, generosity, corruption perception, real gross domestic product per capita and the Gini index on happiness.

In this study, the sample consists of 137 countries observed over the period 2017–2019. A multidimensional approach is used consisting of a principal component analysis and an econometric linear regression model.

The findings indicate that perception, taking care of other people, corruption perception, freedom to make life choices and healthy life expectancy are the most determining factors of social well-being.

Well-being benefits countries by improving living standards. Indeed, taking care of other people, corruption perception, freedom to make life choices and healthy life expectancy directly and positively correlate with social well-being.

This study contributes to the previous literature in three ways. First, this paper provides fresh and recent data on social well-being. Second, the author introduced a multidimensional approach using a principal component analysis of the different social well-being factors to detect correlation between these indicators and to determine homogeneous clusters. Third, through these indicators, a country's leaders can formulate policies to enhance social well-being because it is closely linked to the improvement of the standard of living, good governance and therefore an increase in GDP.

Financial literacy is generally seen as an important factor explaining a broader set of investment behaviors. In the context of a weak financial knowledge in France, this article focuses on the particular situation of Generation Z (individuals born after 1995) and more particularly management students likely to be involved in financial decisions in the near future.

The analysis is based on a survey conducted in the Fall of 2019, through a questionnaire distributed to 300 students enrolled in a French business school.

The results indicate that financial knowledge is poor for students who do not follow a specialized course in finance. This research also demonstrates the importance of risk behavior, showing that risk adverse students are also those with the lowest level of financial literacy.

This article contributes to the academic literature by focusing on students in France. It is the first study to examine Gen Z financial literacy and its implications. It raises awareness on the importance of financial education in the education curriculum.