E4 - Money and Interest Rates
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May 13, 2014
Understanding Platform-Based Digital Currencies
Given technological advances and the widespread use of the Internet, various digital currencies have emerged. In most cases, Internet platforms such as Facebook and Amazon restrict the functionality of their digital currencies to enhance the business model and maximize their profits. While platform-based digital currencies could increase the efficiency of retail payments, they could also raise some important policy issues if they were to become widely used outside of the platform. Thus, it is important to closely monitor the evolution of these digital currencies. -
E-Money: Efficiency, Stability and Optimal Policy
What makes e-money more special than cash? Is the introduction of e-money necessarily welfare enhancing? Is an e-money system necessarily stable? What is the optimal way to design an efficient and stable e-money scheme? -
The Efficiency of Private E-Money-Like Systems: The U.S. Experience with State Bank Notes
In the United States prior to 1863 each bank issued its own distinct notes. E-money shares many of the characteristics of these bank notes. This paper describes some lessons relevant to e-money from the U.S. experience with state bank notes. -
Electronic Money and Payments: Recent Developments and Issues
The authors review recent developments in retail payments in Canada and elsewhere, with a focus on e-money products, and assess their potential public policy implications. -
Bond Risk Premia and Gaussian Term Structure Models
Cochrane and Piazzesi (2005) show that (i) lagged forward rates improve the predictability of annual bond returns, adding to current forward rates, and that (ii) a Markovian model for monthly forward rates cannot generate the pattern of predictability in annual returns. -
Banks’ Financial Distress, Lending Supply and Consumption Expenditure
The paper employs a unique identification strategy that links survey data on household consumption expenditure to bank-level data in order to estimate the effects of bank financial distress on consumer credit and consumption expenditures. -
A Policy Model to Analyze Macroprudential Regulations and Monetary Policy
We construct a small-open-economy, New Keynesian dynamic stochastic general-equilibrium model with real-financial linkages to analyze the effects of financial shocks and macroprudential policies on the Canadian economy. Our model has four key features. -
Household Risk Management and Actual Mortgage Choice in the Euro Area
Mortgages constitute the largest part of household debt. An essential choice when taking out a mortgage is between fixed-interest-rate mortgages (FRMs) and adjustable-interest-rate mortgages (ARMs). However, so far, no comprehensive cross‐country study has analyzed what determines household demand for mortgage types, a task that this paper takes up using new data for the euro area. -
Cash Management and Payment Choices: A Simulation Model with International Comparisons
Despite various payment innovations, today, cash is still heavily used to pay for low-value purchases. This paper develops a simulation model to test whether standard implications of the theory on cash management and payment choices can explain the use of payment instruments by transaction size.