G2 - Financial Institutions and Services
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The impact of higher interest rates on mortgage payments
We investigate how the increase in interest rates since early 2022 is affecting mortgage payments. By November 2023, less than half of mortgage holders had faced higher payments. Many borrowers will see a sizable increase in payments at renewal, although income growth could help mitigate the impact. -
Central Bank Crisis Interventions: A Review of the Recent Literature on Potential Costs
Central banks’ actions to stabilize financial markets and implement monetary policy during crises may come with costs and side effects. We provide a literature review of these costs and discuss measures that may mitigate the negative impacts of crisis actions. -
How Far Do Canadians Need to Travel to Access Cash?
This paper develops a travel-based metric to measure Canadians’ access to cash from automated banking machines (ABMs) and financial institution branches. We find that, overall, access to cash remained stable between 2019 and 2022. The total number of ABMs in Canada increased by 3.7% and the total number of branches decreased by 5.2% during that period. -
Decentralized finance: Innovations and challenges
Decentralized finance surged in popularity around 2020. We explore its value and limitations and highlight some potential regulatory concerns. -
Estimating the Appropriate Quantity of Settlement Balances in a Floor System
This paper presents two complementary approaches to estimating the appropriate quantity of settlement balances needed to effectively operate monetary policy under a floor system in Canada. -
Three things we learned about the Lynx payment system
Canada transitioned to a new wholesale payment system, Lynx, in August 2021. Lynx is based on a real-time settlement model that eliminates credit risk in the system. This model can require more liquidity; however, Lynx’s design allows Canada’s wholesale payments to settle efficiently. -
Intermediary Market Power and Capital Constraints
We examine how intermediary capitalization affects asset prices in a framework that allows for intermediary market power. We introduce a model in which capital-constrained intermediaries buy or trade an asset in an imperfectly competitive market, and we show that weaker capital constraints lead to both higher prices and intermediary markups. -
Anonymous Credentials: Secret-Free and Quantum-Safe
An anonymous credential mechanism is a set of protocols that allows users to obtain credentials from an organization and demonstrate ownership of these credentials without compromising users’ privacy. In this work, we construct the first secret-free and quantum-safe credential mechanism. -
Understanding DeFi Through the Lens of a Production-Network Model
We develop a production-network model to capture how decentralized finance (DeFi) has evolved across different sectors of financial services. The model allows us to measure the value added by different DeFi sectors and to study how the connections across the sectors influence token prices.