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Consumer and Business Payment Behavior in a Survey of Banks: Estimation and Allocation
*Geoffrey Richard Gerdes, Federal Reserve Board 
May Xuemei Liu, Federal Reserve Board 


Keywords: multiple imputation, ratio estimator, EM algorithm,

In the most recent survey, we take advantage of new information collected on the characteristics of the banks and their customers. In particular, payment patterns are found to be correlated with bank’s accountholder characteristics, for example, the proportion of businesses or consumers. Use of the new information improves aggregate estimates. Further, we develop a method that exploits the distributional information about the proportions of businesses and consumers across banks to indirectly allocate the aggregates into consumer and business payment components. The allocation leads to a better understanding of national payment patterns