Staff working papers
Regulatory Requirements of Banks and Arbitrage in the Post-Crisis Federal Funds Market
This paper explains the nature of interest rates in the U.S. federal funds market after the 2007-09 financial crisis. We build a model of the over-the-counter lending market that incorporates new aspects of the financial system: abundance of liquidity, different regulatory standards for banks, and arbitrage opportunities created by limited access to the facility granting interest on excess reserves.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.Why Fixed Costs Matter for Proof-of-Work Based Cryptocurrencies
Can Bitcoin survive? Some say it will become vulnerable to attacks as the rewards for processing Bitcoin transactions continue to decline. The economics of fixed costs suggest the specialized hardware used to mine Bitcoin may be key to its survival.An Application of Shapley Value Cost Allocation to Liquidity Savings Mechanisms
Liquidity demands in real-time gross settlement payment systems can be enormous. To reduce the liquidity requirement, central banks around the world have implemented liquidity savings mechanisms (LSMs).Privacy as a Public Good: A Case for Electronic Cash
Cash gives users a high level of privacy when making payments, but the use of cash to make payments is declining. People increasingly use debit cards, credit cards or other methods to pay.Entrepreneurial Incentives and the Role of Initial Coin Offerings
Initial coin offerings (ICOs) are a new mode of financing start-ups that saw an explosion in popularity in 2017 but declined in popularity in the second half of 2018 as regulatory pressure, instances of fraud and reports of poor performance began to undermine their reputation.Which Bank is the "Central" Bank? An Application of Markov Theory to the Canadian Large Value Transfer System
We use a method similar to Google's PageRank procedure to rank banks in the Canadian Large Value Transfer System (LVTS). Along the way we obtain estimates of the payment processing speeds for the individual banks.Bank publications
Financial System Review articles
May 25, 2017
Project Jasper: Are Distributed Wholesale Payment Systems Feasible Yet?
This report describes a joint endeavour between public and private sectors to explore a wholesale payment system based on distributed ledger technology (DLT). They find that a stand-alone DLT system is unlikely to be as beneficial as a centralized payment system in terms of core operating costs; however, it could increase financial system efficiency as a result of integration with the broader financial market infrastructure.