Digital technologies have helped maintain economic activity while allowing people to remain physically distant throughout the COVID-19 crisis. This note shows that the number of online postings for jobs related to the production of digital technologies in Canada decreased less than the number for other jobs and recovered more quickly after lockdowns were lifted.
Since the mid-2000s, labour productivity has slowed down in Canada despite enormous technological advances that were expected to improve it. This note investigates whether mismeasurement of the digital economy can explain this paradox.
Firms are at the forefront of adopting new technology. Using survey data from a global network of central banks, we assess the effects of digitalization on firms’ pricing and employment decisions.
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.
Security is an important element in ensuring public confidence in a central bank digital currency (CBDC). This note highlights the required security properties of a CBDC system and the challenges encountered with existing solutions, should the Bank of Canada choose to issue one.
Privacy is a key aspect of a potential central bank digital currency system. We outline different technical choices to enact various privacy models while complying with the appropriate regulations. We develop a framework to evaluate privacy models and list key risks and trade-offs in privacy design.
In this note, we highlight a range of technical options and considerations in designing a contingent system for a central bank digital currency (CBDC) in Canada and explore how these options achieve stated public policy goals.
We study how input-output networks affect the speed of technology adoption. In particular, we model the decision to adopt the programming language Python 3 by software packages. Python 3 provides advanced features but is not backward compatible with Python 2, which implies it comes with adoption costs.