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29 Results

We Didn’t Start the Fire: Effects of a Natural Disaster on Consumers’ Financial Distress

We use detailed consumer credit data to investigate the impact of the 2016 Fort McMurray wildfire, the costliest wildfire disaster in Canadian history, on consumers’ financial stress. We focus on the arrears of insured mortgages because of their important implications for financial institutions and insurers’ business risk and relevant management practices.

Equilibrium in Two-Sided Markets for Payments: Consumer Awareness and the Welfare Cost of the Interchange Fee

Staff Working Paper 2022-15 Kim Huynh, Gradon Nicholls, Oleksandr Shcherbakov
We construct and estimate a structural two-stage model of equilibrium in a market for payments in order to quantify the network externalities and identify the main determinants of consumer and merchant decisions.

COVID-19, Containment and Consumption

We assess the impact of COVID-19 on consumption indicators by estimating the effects of government-mandated containment measures and of the willingness of individuals to voluntarily physically distance to prevent contagion.

The COVID-19 Consumption Game-Changer: Evidence from a Large-Scale Multi-Country Survey

A multi-country consumer survey investigates why and how much households decreased their consumption in five key sectors after pandemic-related restrictions were lifted in Europe in July 2020. Beyond infection risk and precautionary saving motives, households also reported not missing some consumption items, which may indicate preference shifts and structural changes in the post-COVID-19 economy.

Payment Habits During COVID-19: Evidence from High-Frequency Transaction Data

Staff Working Paper 2021-43 Tatjana Dahlhaus, Angelika Welte
We examine how consumers have adjusted their payment habits during the COVID-19 pandemic. They seem to perform fewer transactions, spend more in each transaction, use less cash at the point of sale and withdraw cash from ATMs linked to their financial institution more often than from other ATMs.

Distributional Effects of Payment Card Pricing and Merchant Cost Pass-through in Canada and the United States

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.

Losing Contact: The Impact of Contactless Payments on Cash Usage

Staff Working Paper 2020-56 Marie-Hélène Felt
Contactless payment cards are a competitive alternative to cash. Using Canadian panel data from 2010 to 2017, this study investigates whether contactless credit cards are an important contributor to the decline in the transactional use of cash. 

What do high-frequency expenditure network data reveal about spending and inflation during COVID‑19?

Staff Analytical Note 2020-20 Kim Huynh, Helen Lao, Patrick Sabourin, Angelika Welte
The official consumer price index (CPI) inflation measure, based on a fixed basket set before the COVID 19 pandemic, may not fully reflect what consumers are currently experiencing. We partnered with Statistics Canada to construct a more representative index for the pandemic with weights based on real-time transaction and survey data.

Household indebtedness risks in the wake of COVID‑19

Staff Analytical Note 2020-8 Olga Bilyk, Anson T. Y. Ho, Mikael Khan, Geneviève Vallée
COVID-19 presents challenges for indebted households. We assess these by drawing parallels between pandemics and natural disasters. Taking into account the financial health of the household sector when the pandemic began, we run model simulations to illustrate how payment deferrals and the labour market recovery will affect mortgage defaults.
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