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We study the competition between a welfare-maximizing public payment platform (e.g., CBDC or fast payment system) and a profit-maximizing private platform in a two-sided market, deriving optimal public pricing and showing how network effects, fragmentation, and policy mandates like zero fees or cost recovery shape welfare, usage, and fee incidence.

We estimate the effects of economic uncertainty on time use and discuss its macroeconomic implications. We develop a model to demonstrate that substitution between market and non-market work provides an additional insurance margin to households, weakening precautionary savings and labour supply and lowering aggregate demand, ultimately amplifying the contractionary effects of uncertainty.

Monetary theory says that money is essential if it helps to achieve better incentive-feasible outcomes. We test this in the laboratory.

We analyze the interaction between committed monetary policy and discretionary fiscal policy in a model with public debt, endogenous government expenditures, distortive taxation and nominal rigidities.

The arrival of immigrants increases demand for housing and puts upward pressure on shelter prices. Using instrumental variables based on the ancestry composition of residents in US counties, we estimate the causal impact of immigration on local shelter prices.

We use Bayesian predictive decision synthesis to formalize monetary policy decision-making. We develop a case-study of monetary policy decision-making of an inflation-targeting central bank using multiple models in a manner that considers decision goals, expectations and outcomes.

The Canadian Financial Monitor (CFM) survey uses non-probability sampling for data collection, so selection bias is likely. We outline methods for obtaining survey weights and discuss the conditions necessary for these weights to eliminate selection bias. We obtain calibration weights for the 2018 and 2019 online CFM samples.

This paper studies optimal need-based financial aid when parental transfers—unobserved by policymakers—vary across and within families of similar means. Using data on U.S. college students, I document substantial inequality in parental transfers, especially among wealthier families. I then analyze how this affects aid design aimed at reducing inefficiencies from borrowing constraints and the aid itself.

We study how different types of monetary policy shape the distributional effects of external economic shocks on households’ consumption in a small open economy. Our results present a trade-off between maintaining overall stabilization and controlling consumption inequality.

Since the autumn of 1997, the regional offices of the Bank of Canada have conducted quarterly consultations with businesses across Canada. Timed to feed into the process that precedes the Bank's fixed dates for announcing monetary policy decisions, the consultations (now referred to as the Business Outlook Survey) are structured around a questionnaire which is sent to 100 firms that reflect the Canadian economy in terms of region, type of business activity, and firm size. Martin describes both the consultation process and the questionnaire and makes an initial assessment of the data gathered during the business interviews. The article includes charts and correlation tables that illustrate the responses to the key questions included in the survey.