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We update an assessment of potential changes in payments that mortgage holders could face at renewal in 2025 and 2026. We use an enhanced dataset (RESL2) that provides a more accurate starting point for mortgage balances.

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.

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 find that minority households see greater declines in housing returns and entries into homeownership than White households after a tightening of monetary policy. Our findings emphasize the unintended consequences of monetary policy on racial inequality in the housing market.

Using U.S. county-level data from 1990 to 2010, we study the causal impact of immigration on the provision of local public goods. We uncover substantial heterogeneity across immigrants with different skills and immigrants of different generations, which leads to unequal fiscal effects across U.S. counties.

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.

We apply two machine learning algorithms to forecast monthly growth of house prices and existing homes sales in Canada. Although the algorithms can sometimes outperform a linear model, the improvement in forecast accuracy is not always statistically significant.

We propose a model to understand low observed migration rates by considering the interaction between location and wealth decisions. We look at different policies and find that temporary moving vouchers only slightly increase welfare, while lower housing regulations can decrease the welfare gap by lowering house prices nationwide.