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Abstract:
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The Federal Reserve System relies on surveys of banks to monitor the aggregate use of paper checks and other major noncash payment methods. In recent surveys, the bank population was stratified by type and by a universally available measure of size correlated with payments, transaction deposits. For the estimation of, say, the number of checks, the separate ratio estimator has many desirable features. However, questions arose as to which and how many auxiliary variables should be used. Also, due to varied and significant levels of item nonresponse and adding-up requirements, constrained imputation methods were used for estimation which created special challenges for constructing error measures using standard methods, e.g., multiple imputation. Despite the difficulties, we find that the conclusion that check usage is declining relative to electronic payment methods is robust.
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