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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1320 result(s)

(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. 

Strategic Uncertainty in Financial Markets: Evidence from a Consensus Pricing Service

Staff Working Paper 2020-55 Lerby Ergun, Andreas Uthemann
We look at the informational content of consensus pricing in opaque over-the-counter markets. We show that the availability of price data informs participants mainly about other participants’ valuations, rather than about the value of a financial security.

Labor Market Policies During an Epidemic

Staff Working Paper 2020-54 Serdar Birinci, Fatih Karahan, Yusuf Mercan, Kurt See
We study the labour market and welfare effects of expanding unemployment insurance benefits and introducing payroll subsidies during the COVID-19 pandemic. We find that both policies are complementary and are beneficial to different types of workers. Payroll subsidies preserve the employment of workers in highly productive jobs, while unemployment insurance replaces lost income for workers who experience inevitable job loss.

Safe Payments

In a cashless economy, would the private sector invest in the optimal level of safety in a deposit-based payment system? In general, because of externalities, the answer is no. While the private sector could over- or under-invest in safety, the government can use taxes or subsidies to correct private incentives.
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