Average is Good Enough: Average-inflation Targeting and the ELB
The Great Recession and current pandemic have focused attention on the constraint on nominal interest rates from the effective lower bound.
Staff working papers
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Ten Isn’t Large! Group Size and Coordination in a Large-Scale Experiment
Economic activities typically involve coordination among a large number of agents. These agents have to anticipate what other agents think before making their own decisions. -
Maturity Composition and the Demand for Government Debt
The main objectives of debt management are to raise stable and low-cost funding to meet the government’s financial needs and to maintain a well-functioning market for government securities. -
Non-competing Data Intermediaries
I study a model of competing data intermediaries (e.g., online platforms and data brokers) that collect personal data from consumers and sell it to downstream firms. -
Why Fixed Costs Matter for Proof-of-Work Based Cryptocurrencies
Can Bitcoin survive? Some say it will become vulnerable to attacks as the rewards for processing Bitcoin transactions continue to decline. The economics of fixed costs suggest the specialized hardware used to mine Bitcoin may be key to its survival. -
Monetary Policy Implementation and Payment System Modernization
Canada plans to adopt a retail payment system to allow Canadians to pay in real time (or near real time) 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. However, the traditional model for setting the overnight interest rate does not operate 24/7. -
Monetary Policy Independence and the Strength of the Global Financial Cycle
We propose a new strength measure of the global financial cycle by estimating a regime-switching factor model on cross-border equity flows for 61 countries. We then assess how the strength of the global financial cycle affects monetary policy independence, which is defined as the response of central banks' policy interest rates to exogenous changes in inflation. -
An Economic Perspective on Payments Migration
Consumers, businesses and banks make millions of payments each day using a variety of instruments, such as debit cards, cheques and wires. Canada is currently developing three new systems to process these transactions: Lynx, Settlement Optimization Engine (SOE) and Real-Time Rail (RTR). -
Trading for Bailouts
In times of high uncertainty, governments often implement interventions such as bailouts to financial institutions. To use public resources efficiently and to avoid major spillovers to the rest of the economy, policy-makers try to identify which institutions should receive assistance. -
Dynamic Competition in Negotiated Price Markets
Repeated interactions between borrowers and lenders create the possibility of dynamic pricing: lenders compete aggressively with low prices to attract new borrowers and then raise their prices once borrowers have made a commitment. We find such pricing patterns in the Canadian mortgage market.