Distributional Effects of Payment Card Pricing and Merchant Cost Pass-through in Canada and the United States Staff working paper 2021-8 Marie-Hélène Felt, Fumiko Hayashi, Joanna Stavins, Angelika Welte Although credit cards are more expensive for merchants to accept than cash or debit cards, merchants typically pass through their costs evenly to all customers. Along with consumer card rewards and banking fees, this creates cross-subsidies between payment methods. Because higher-income individuals tend to use credit cards more than those with lower incomes, our results indicate that these cross-subsidies might lead to regressive distributional effects. Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers JEL Code(s): D, D1, D12, D2, D23, D3, D31, E, E4, E42, G, G2, G21, L, L8, L81 Research Theme(s): Financial markets and funds management, Market structure, Money and payments, Retail payments
Towards a HANK Model for Canada: Estimating a Canadian Income Process Staff discussion paper 2020-13 Iskander Karibzhanov How might one simulate a million realistic income paths and compute their statistical moments in under a second? Using CUDA-based methods to estimate the Canadian earnings process, I find that the distribution of labour income growth is sharply peaked with heavy tails—similar to that in the United States. Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff discussion papers JEL Code(s): D, D3, D31, E, E2, E24, J, J3, J31 Research Theme(s): Models and tools, Economic models, Monetary policy, Real economy and forecasting
Model Uncertainty and Wealth Distribution Staff working paper 2019-48 Edouard Djeutem, Shaofeng Xu This paper studies the implications of model uncertainty for wealth distribution in a tractable general equilibrium model with a borrowing constraint and robustness à la Hansen and Sargent (2008). Households confront model uncertainty about the process driving the return of the risky asset, and they choose robust policies. Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers JEL Code(s): D, D3, D8, E, E2 Research Theme(s): Financial system, Household and business credit, Models and tools, Economic models, Monetary policy, Real economy and forecasting