D - Microeconomics
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Update on housing market imbalances and household indebtedness
Exceptional strength in the housing market during the pandemic is underpinning Canada’s economic recovery. However, two key vulnerabilities—housing market imbalances and elevated household indebtedness—have intensified. -
Stablecoin Assessment Framework
We offer relevant authorities a three-step assessment framework they can use to understand, identify and quantify the risks associated with stablecoin and other cryptocurrency arrangements. -
Trade and Market Power in Product and Labor Markets
Trade liberalizations increase the sales and input purchases of productive firms relative to their less productive domestic competitors. This reallocation affects firms’ market power in their product and input markets. I quantify how the labour market power of employers affects the distribution and size of the gains from trade. -
How Long is Forever in the Laboratory? Three Implementations of an Infinite-Horizon Monetary Economy
Standard monetary models adopt an infinite horizon with discounting. Testing these models in the lab requires implementing this horizon within a limited time frame. We compare three approaches to such an implementation and discuss their relative advantages. -
COVID-19 Crisis: Lessons Learned for Future Policy Research
One year later, we review the events that took place in Canadian fixed-income markets at the beginning of the COVID-19 crisis and propose potential policy research questions for future work. -
Market Concentration and Uniform Pricing: Evidence from Bank Mergers
We show that US banks price deposits almost uniformly across their branches and that this pricing practice is more important than increases in local market concentration in explaining the deposit rate dynamics following bank mergers. -
Distributional Effects of Payment Card Pricing and Merchant Cost Pass-through in Canada and the United States
Although credit cards are more expensive for merchants to accept than cash or debit cards, merchants typically pass through their costs evenly to all customers. Along with consumer card rewards and banking fees, this creates cross-subsidies between payment methods. Because higher-income individuals tend to use credit cards more than those with lower incomes, our results indicate that these cross-subsidies might lead to regressive distributional effects. -
Estimating Policy Functions in Payments Systems Using Reinforcement Learning
We demonstrate the ability of reinforcement learning techniques to estimate the best-response functions of banks participating in high-value payments systems—a real-world strategic game of incomplete information. -
Allocative Efficiency and Aggregate Productivity Growth in Canada and the United States
The lack of improvement in allocative efficiency plays a quantitatively important role in the productivity slowdown in the United States and the widening Canada–US productivity gap.