Marion Public Library (located in Marion, Ohio, 45 miles north of Columbus) serves as repository for a collection of documents produced in response to local concern about the incidence of leukemia and other ailments among the population. Former athletes at the River Valley High School, several miles east of town, were particularly at risk. Inquiries revealed that the school was built on a former WW II military site, and that the school's ballpark was above...

This paper uses discrete-choice models to quantify the role of consumer socioeconomic characteristics, payment instrument attributes, and transaction features on the probability of using cash, debit card, or credit card at the point-of-sale. We use the Bank of Canada 2009 Method of Payment Survey, a two-part survey among adult Canadians containing a detailed questionnaire and a three-day shopping diary. We find that cash is still used intensively at low value transactions due to speed, merchant...

Many predict that innovations in retail payment may render cash obsolete. We investigate this possibility in the context of recent payment innovations such as contactless-credit and stored-value cards. We apply causal inference methods on the 2009 Bank of Canada Method of Payment survey, a representative sample of adult Canadians’ shopping behaviour for retail consumption over a three-day period. We find that using contactless credit cards and stored-value cards lead to a reduction in average cash...