Financial innovations and currency demand: Some new evidence

This paper presents new evidence on the importance of financial innovations for the demand for currency. We use Finnish data on credit card transactions to estimate a currency demand equation which fits the data very well, implies meaningful elasticities and does not suffer from obvious diagnostic problems such as parameter instability. As far as the key elasticities are concerned, it turns out that credit card transactions have a strong offsetting effect on currency demand. By contrast, inflation and tax evasion have only an insignificant demand effect.