Staff research

We study access to Canadian retail banking and cash services in rural, localized markets using the Bresnahan-Reiss entry threshold framework. We find that the first retail banking services branch entry requires about 500 residents in an average market, whereas the first cash services location requires about 80 residents.

Our paper employs smartphone data to construct an improved cash access metric by accounting for both spatial agglomeration and households’ travel patterns. We find that incorporating trip-chaining into the travel metric could show that travel costs are from 15 to 25% less than not incorporating trip-chaining and that the biggest decrease is driven by rural residents.

This study updates our measure of Canadians' access to cash through automated banking machines and financial institution branches. We find that in 2023 overall access to cash remains stable, while rural Canadians continue having less access.

This paper introduces a subjective measure of cash accessibility in Canada, complementing existing distance-based metrics developed by Chen, O’Habib and Xiao (2023). Analyzing data from the 2023 Methods-of-Payment Survey, this study explores how Canadians perceive their ease of accessing cash from automated banking machines (ABMs) and financial institution branches.

This study uses the COVID-19 travel restrictions to estimate foreign demand for Canadian banknotes. It reveals that international visitors accounted for about 10% of all $100 CAD notes in circulation pre-pandemic, with each visitor carrying an average of $165 in hundred-dollar bills.

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.

This paper measures how both geographical and cultural proximity of bank branches affect household credit choice and pricing. For credit products that require high levels of ex-ante screening, we find that both proximities can complement each other in reducing the cost of providing soft information, thereby increasing credit access.

We propose an early warning model for predicting the likelihood of a financial stress event for a given future time, and examine whether credit plays an important role in the model as a non-linear propagator of shocks.