E - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics
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An Overview of the Indigenous Economy in Canada
Several measures suggest economic outcomes have improved for Indigenous Peoples in recent decades. Yet, institutional settings and gaps in infrastructure and financing continue to hinder their economic progress. Recent efforts have helped address some data gaps, and new institutions are helping Indigenous communities to overcome historic barriers to growth. -
Variations in Pass-Through from Global Agricultural Commodity Prices to Domestic Food Inflation
This paper examines factors that affect the transmission of fluctuations in global agricultural commodity prices to domestic food inflation. -
Three things we learned about the Lynx payment system
Canada transitioned to a new wholesale payment system, Lynx, in August 2021. Lynx is based on a real-time settlement model that eliminates credit risk in the system. This model can require more liquidity; however, Lynx’s design allows Canada’s wholesale payments to settle efficiently. -
Labor Market Shocks and Monetary Policy
We develop a heterogeneous-agent New Keynesian model featuring a frictional labor market with on-the-job search to quantitatively study the positive and normative implications of employer-to-employer transitions for inflation. -
Redefining Financial Inclusion for a Digital Age: Implications for a Central Bank Digital Currency
We explore quantitative and qualitative information about Canadians who face barriers to making digital payments. We also consider the implications of ongoing digitalization for modern financial inclusion and a potential central bank digital currency. -
Anonymous Credentials: Secret-Free and Quantum-Safe
An anonymous credential mechanism is a set of protocols that allows users to obtain credentials from an organization and demonstrate ownership of these credentials without compromising users’ privacy. In this work, we construct the first secret-free and quantum-safe credential mechanism. -
Should Banks Be Worried About Dividend Restrictions?
A regulator would want to restrict dividends to force banks to rebuild capital during a crisis. But such a policy is not time-consistent. A time-consistent policy would let banks gradually rebuild capital and pay dividends even when their equity remains below pre-crisis levels. -
Tattle-tails: Gauging downside risks using option prices
Options markets offer unique insights into the changing risks different assets face, which helps us better understand the broader risks to the Canadian economy. We show how option prices help reveal that investors did not anticipate large downside risks to either major Canadian banks or economic growth during the March 2023 financial sector system stress, a period when policy-makers and investors were unsure of what the future held for Canada’s economy. -
Digitalization: Definition and Measurement
This paper provides an overview of digitalization and its economic implications. We assess the scope of digitalization in Canada as well as the challenges related to its measurement.