Staff working papers

Staff working papers provide a forum for staff to publish work-in-progress research intended for journal publication.

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1323 result(s)

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.

Estimating Policy Functions in Payments Systems Using Reinforcement Learning

We demonstrate the ability of reinforcement learning techniques to estimate the best-response functions of banks participating in high-value payments systems—a real-world strategic game of incomplete information.

Eggs in One Basket: Security and Convenience of Digital Currencies

Staff Working Paper 2021-6 Charles M. Kahn, Francisco Rivadeneyra, Tsz-Nga Wong
Digital currencies store balances in anonymous electronic addresses. This paper analyzes the trade-offs between the safety and convenience of aggregating balances in addresses, electronic wallets and banks.

(Optimal) Monetary Policy with and without Debt

How should policy be designed at high debt levels, when fiscal authorities have little room to adjust taxes? Assigning the monetary authority a role in achieving debt sustainability makes it less effective in stabilizing inflation and output.

Networking the Yield Curve: Implications for Monetary Policy

We study how different monetary policies affect the yield curve and interact. Our study highlights the importance of the spillover structure across the yield curve for policy-making.

Using Payments Data to Nowcast Macroeconomic Variables During the Onset of COVID-19

Staff Working Paper 2021-2 James Chapman, Ajit Desai
We use retail payment data in conjunction with machine learning techniques to predict the effects of COVID-19 on the Canadian economy in near-real time. Our model yields a significant increase in macroeconomic prediction accuracy over a linear benchmark model.

Allocative Efficiency and the Productivity Slowdown

Staff Working Paper 2021-1 Lin Shao, Rongsheng Tang
In our analysis of the US productivity slowdown in the 1970s and 2000s, we find that a significant portion of this deceleration can be attributed to a lack of improvement in allocative efficiency across sectors. Our analysis further identifies increased sector-level volatility as a major contributor to this lack of improvement in allocative efficiency.
Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Topic(s): Economic models, Productivity JEL Code(s): E, E2, E23, O, O4, O47

Consumer Credit with Over-optimistic Borrowers

When lenders cannot directly identify behavioural and rational borrowers, they use type scoring to track the likelihood of a borrower’s type. This leads to the partial pooling of borrowers, which results in rational borrowers subsidizing borrowing costs for behavioural borrowers. This, in turn, reduces the effectiveness of regulatory policies that target mistakes by behavioural borrowers.

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. 
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