Research
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Losing Contact: The Impact of Contactless Payments on Cash Usage
Contactless payment cards are a competitive alternative to cash. Using Canadian panel data from 2010 to 2017, this study investigates whether contactless credit cards are an important contributor to the decline in the transactional use of cash. -
Implementation and Effectiveness of Extended Monetary Policy Tools: Lessons from the Literature
This paper summarizes the literature on the performance of various extended monetary policy tools when conventional policy rates are constrained by the effective lower bound. We highlight issues that may arise when these tools are used by central banks of small open economies. -
A Reference Guide for the Business Outlook Survey
The Business Outlook Survey (BOS) has become an important part of monetary policy deliberations at the Bank of Canada and is also well known in Canadian policy and financial circles. This paper compiles more than 20 years of experience conducting the BOS and serves as a comprehensive reference manual. -
Strategic Uncertainty in Financial Markets: Evidence from a Consensus Pricing Service
We look at the informational content of consensus pricing in opaque over-the-counter markets. We show that the availability of price data informs participants mainly about other participants’ valuations, rather than about the value of a financial security. -
Labor Market Policies During an Epidemic
We study the labour market and welfare effects of expanding unemployment insurance benefits and introducing payroll subsidies during the COVID-19 pandemic. We find that both policies are complementary and are beneficial to different types of workers. Payroll subsidies preserve the employment of workers in highly productive jobs, while unemployment insurance replaces lost income for workers who experience inevitable job loss. -
Can the Business Outlook Survey Help Improve Estimates of the Canadian Output Gap?
We investigate whether questions in the Bank of Canada’s Business Outlook Survey can provide useful signals for the output gap. -
Towards a HANK Model for Canada: Estimating a Canadian Income Process
How might one simulate a million realistic income paths and compute their statistical moments in under a second? Using CUDA-based methods to estimate the Canadian earnings process, I find that the distribution of labour income growth is sharply peaked with heavy tails—similar to that in the United States. -
Safe Payments
In a cashless economy, would the private sector invest in the optimal level of safety in a deposit-based payment system? In general, because of externalities, the answer is no. While the private sector could over- or under-invest in safety, the government can use taxes or subsidies to correct private incentives. -
2020 US Neutral Rate Assessment
This paper presents Bank of Canada staff’s current assessment of the US neutral rate, along with a newly developed set of models on which that assessment is based. The overall assessment is that the US neutral rate currently lies in a range of 1.75 to 2.75 percent.