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Explaining the Interplay Between Merchant Acceptance and Consumer Adoption in Two-Sided Markets for Payment Methods

Staff Working Paper 2019-32 Kim Huynh, Gradon Nicholls, Oleksandr Shcherbakov
Recent consumer and merchant surveys show a decrease in the use of cash at the point of sale. Increasingly, consumers and merchants have access to a growing array of payment innovations as substitutes for cash.

A Tale of Two Countries: Cash Demand in Canada and Sweden

Staff Discussion Paper 2019-7 Walter Engert, Ben Fung, Björn Segendorf
Cash use for payments has been steadily decreasing in many countries, including Canada and Sweden. This might suggest an evolution toward a cashless society. But in Canada, cash in circulation relative to GDP has been stable for decades and has even increased in recent years. By contrast, the cash-to-GDP ratio in Sweden has been falling steadily. What has caused this difference? Are there lessons to be learned from comparing the Canadian and Swedish experiences?

Privacy as a Public Good: A Case for Electronic Cash

Staff Working Paper 2019-24 Rodney J. Garratt, Maarten van Oordt
Cash gives users a high level of privacy when making payments, but the use of cash to make payments is declining. People increasingly use debit cards, credit cards or other methods to pay.

Crypto ‘Money’: Perspective of a Couple of Canadian Central Bankers

Staff Discussion Paper 2019-1 James Chapman, Carolyn A. Wilkins
The market for cryptoassets has exploded in size in the 10 years since bitcoin was launched. The technology underlying cryptoassets, blockchain, has also been held up as a technology that promises to transform entire industries.

Should the Central Bank Issue E-money?

Staff Working Paper 2018-58 Charles M. Kahn, Francisco Rivadeneyra, Tsz-Nga Wong
Should a central bank take over the provision of e-money, a circulable electronic liability? We discuss how e-money technology changes the tradeoff between public and private provision, and the tradeoff between e-money and a central bank's existing liabilities like bank notes and reserves.

Is a Cashless Society Problematic?

Staff Discussion Paper 2018-12 Walter Engert, Ben Fung, Scott Hendry
The use of bank notes in Canada for payments has declined consistently for some time, and similar trends are evident in other countries. This has led some observers to predict a cashless society in the future.

How Long Does It Take You to Pay? A Duration Study of Canadian Retail Transaction Payment Times

Staff Working Paper 2018-46 Geneviève Vallée
Using an exclusive data set of payment times for retail transactions made in Canada, I show that cash is the most time-efficient method of payment (MOP) when compared with payments by debit and credit cards. I model payment efficiency using Cox proportional hazard models, accounting for consumer choice of MOP.

A Look Inside the Box: Combining Aggregate and Marginal Distributions to Identify Joint Distributions

Staff Working Paper 2018-29 Marie-Hélène Felt
This paper proposes a method for estimating the joint distribution of two or more variables when only their marginal distributions and the distribution of their aggregates are observed. Nonparametric identification is achieved by modelling dependence using a latent common-factor structure.
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