Abstract The incidence of COVID-19 has systematically decreased households’ use of cash as means of payment as well as the average size and frequency of cash withdrawals. We argue that the structure of Baumol–Tobin type inventory theoretical models and their extensions can be used to separate the confounding factors, such as the desired level of consumption and the choice of the fraction of consumption paid in cash, from the cash management behavior, i.e. the size and frequency of cash withdrawals. Using this insight we argue that the observed cash management is consistent with COVID-19 increasing the fixed cost of withdrawing cash. We use detailed data on ATM cash disbursements in Argentina, Chile, and the US to estimate how much the pandemic has changed the transaction cost of using cash. This estimation shows that if the intensity of the virus doubles in a county, cash transaction cost increases by approximately 2%. The results from Argentina, Chile, and the US are remarkably similar and robust to several forms of measurement error and endogeneity.

中文翻译：

---

Covid-19 时代的现金管理

摘要 COVID-19 的发病率降低了家庭使用现金作为支付手段的程度，以及现金提取的平均规模和频率。我们认为，Baumol-Tobin 型库存理论模型的结构及其扩展可用于将混杂因素与现金管理行为分开，例如期望的消费水平和现金支付的消费比例的选择，即提取现金的规模和频率。利用这一见解，我们认为观察到的现金管理与 COVID-19 一致，增加了提取现金的固定成本。我们使用阿根廷、智利和美国的 ATM 现金支付的详细数据来估计大流行对使用现金的交易成本的影响有多大。这一估计表明，如果一个县的病毒强度增加一倍，现金交易成本将增加约 2%。阿根廷、智利和美国的结果非常相似，并且对多种形式的测量误差和内生性具有鲁棒性。