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Cash is the preferred method of payment for small value transactions generally less than $25. We provide insight to this finding with a new theoretical model that characterizes and compares consumers’ costs of paying with cash to paying with cards for each transaction.

Measuring cryptoasset knowledge alongside financial knowledge enhances our understanding of individuals' decisions to purchase cryptoassets. This paper uses microdata from the Bank of Canada’s Bitcoin Omnibus Survey to examine gender differences and the interrelationship between crypto and financial knowledge through an empirical joint analysis.

Innovations in basic information technologies, in payment applications, and in the availability of global markets, as well as substantial changes in financial sector policy, have fundamentally changed how the retail payments system in Canada operates. Principally, the volume and types of electronic payments have grown, and there is increased participation by diverse groups of financial and non-financial institutions as providers of retail payment services. The resulting policy problem for payment systems is how best to benefit from efficiency gains while managing payment risks. O'Connor examines the effect of the technological and legislative changes and the initiatives developed by the public and private sectors in such areas as the market arrangements for services; customer risks and costs for settling large-value retail payments; the security of payment information and the efficiency with which it is transmitted; and the effects of differing regulatory regimes on competition among providers of retail payment services.

The number of workers who hold more than one job (a.k.a. multiple jobholders) has increased recently in Canada. While this seems to echo the view that non-standard work arrangements are becoming pervasive, the increase has in fact been trivial compared with the long-run rise of multiple jobholding that has occurred since the mid-1970s.

This paper studies how financial shocks shape the distribution of output growth by introducing a quantile-augmented vector autoregression (QAVAR), which integrates quantile regressions into a structural VAR framework. The QAVAR preserves standard shock identification while delivering flexible, nonparametric forecasts of conditional moments and tail risk measures for gross domestic product.

Economic activities typically involve coordination among a large number of agents. These agents have to anticipate what other agents think before making their own decisions.

We examine how demographic factors influence potential output, focusing on how the age distribution of the working-age population and the old-age dependency ratio affect aggregate productivity. Following Feyrer (2007), we emphasize that the contribution to aggregate productivity varies by age group, with middle-aged individuals (aged 40 to 49) being the most productive.

The Bank’s internal credit risk assessment abilities are regularly enhanced. In this note, we present a recent innovation that extends the set of market-based indicators used in the credit risk assessment of financial counterparties.

We add agency costs as in Carlstrom and Fuerst (1997) into a two-country, two-good international business-cycle model. In our model, changes in the relative price of investment arise endogenously.

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.