Search

This paper analyzes cross-border cryptocurrency flows, focusing on Bitcoin and four major stablecoins. Using data for 162 countries, we identify the key determinants, including responses to weak economic conditions and demand for remittances. A COVID-19 case study supports these findings and emphasizes the role of cryptocurrencies in global finance.

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.

Project Samara was a real‑world experiment testing distributed ledger technology and wholesale central bank digital money for bond issuance and settlement in Canada. It demonstrated technical feasibility and potential efficiency and risk‑reduction benefits, while highlighting important trade‑offs related to complexity, governance, and regulatory alignment.

This paper introduces CLONE, a method that decomposes asset price movements into aggregate demand, productivity, inflation, and monetary policy news, using stocks, bonds, and inflation swaps. CLONE simplicity and forward-looking focus helps guide policymakers in determining the economic drivers behind asset price movements.

Can monetary policy influence the neutral real interest rate (r-star)? Using a new statistical model, we show that interest rate hikes tend to lower r-star and long-run growth, but that monetary policy explains only a small share of the long-run decline in r-star.

Previous research suggests that lower-income Canadians may have unique experiences with the use of payments, including the use of cash and digital payments. We conduct a case study using data from [the Canadian Financial Diaries project/Canadian financial diaries] to gain insight into how some lower-income Canadians pay.

This note examines how monetary policy responses to shelter inflation affect both the overall economy and different households. We find that the aggregate macroeconomic effects of responding to shelter inflation are modest, whereas the redistributive consequences across households are substantially larger.

We quantify the effects of large-scale stock purchases by a central bank and compare these to bond purchases. We find that the central bank’s equity purchases would lower the risk and term premiums on stocks and long-term bonds, respectively, and thereby stimulate economic activity.

We explore how many electronic funds transfer (EFT) systems can viably coexist within a jurisdiction at efficient scale by estimating the cost curve of the average EFT. We estimate the marginal cost to be approximately $0.55 per transaction, and the fixed cost to be approximately $83 million per year.

When a bank holds a lot of safe assets, it is well situated to deal with funding stress. But when all banks hold a lot of safe assets, a pecuniary externality implies that their (wholesale) funding costs increase. This reduces banks’ ability to hold capital buffers and thus, paradoxically, increases the frequency of funding stress.