Many consumers use payment instruments to control their budget. Previously, such behavior has been associated with checking disposable cash ("pocket watching"). Based on recent survey data, we show that "digital watchers" have emerged, i.e., noncash payers who use digital applications to control their budget. Both watcher types have distinct characteristics. Pocket watchers tend to have lower incomes than other consumers, while digital watchers ascribe low security risk to payment cards. Watching behavior influences current and future payment behaviors. Pocket watchers use cash more intensively than nonwatching cash payers. Digital watchers expect to intensify their reliance on noncash payment instruments more strongly than nonwatching noncash payers.
This paper analyses the determinants of firm participation in the Swiss COVID-19 loan programme, which aims to bridge firms' liquidity shortfalls that have resulted from the pandemic. State guaranteed COVID-19 loans are widely used by Swiss firms, with 20% of all firms participating, resulting in a sizeable programme of 2.4% of GDP. We use a complete firm-level dataset to study the determinants of firm participation. Our results can be summarised as follows. First, participation was largely driven by the exposure of a firm to lockdown restrictions and to the intensity of the virus in the specific region. Second, we show that less liquid firms had a significantly higher probability of participating in the programme. Third, we find no clear evidence that firm indebtedness affected participation in the programme and no evidence that pre-existing potential zombie firms participated more strongly in the loan programme. Fourth, we show that the programme reached younger and smaller firms, which could be financially more vulnerable as they are less likely to obtain outside finance during a crisis. Overall, we conclude that given its objective, the programme appears to be successful.
We use unique individual bank-to-bank repo transaction data to empirically assess the efficiency of the existing Swiss financial market infrastructure (FMI) for executing delivery versus payment transactions. This approach enables us to identify its current benefits and drawbacks and discuss how these could be addressed and to what extent distributed ledger technology (DLT) could provide a remedy. We find that the fastest settlement time for repo transactions is 12 seconds, but that settlements are often delayed by more than 10 minutes due to the lack of collateral availability. We conclude that the cross-border availability of securities needs to be addressed by either improving interoperability of existing infrastructures or using new technologies.
