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Innovations in basic information technologies, in payment applications, and in the availability of global markets, as well as substantial changes in financial sector policy, have fundamentally changed how the retail payments system in Canada operates. Principally, the volume and types of electronic payments have grown, and there is increased participation by diverse groups of financial and non-financial institutions as providers of retail payment services. The resulting policy problem for payment systems is how best to benefit from efficiency gains while managing payment risks. O'Connor examines the effect of the technological and legislative changes and the initiatives developed by the public and private sectors in such areas as the market arrangements for services; customer risks and costs for settling large-value retail payments; the security of payment information and the efficiency with which it is transmitted; and the effects of differing regulatory regimes on competition among providers of retail payment services.

We present the R package MSTest, which implements hypothesis testing procedures to determine the number of regimes in Markov switching models. The package provides several testing frameworks, including Monte Carlo likelihood ratio tests, moment-based tests, parameter stability tests, and classical likelihood ratio procedures.

The Bank expects Canada’s economy to grow by almost 4 percent on average in 2021 and 2022, following a decline of about 5 ½ percent in 2020.

The goods and services sectors have experienced considerably different dynamics over the past three decades. Our goal in this paper is to understand how such contrasting behaviors at the sectoral level affect the aggregate level of trend inflation dynamics.

We analyze the interaction between committed monetary policy and discretionary fiscal policy in a model with public debt, endogenous government expenditures, distortive taxation and nominal rigidities.

The Reports section of the Financial System Review examines selected issues of relevance to the Canadian and global financial systems. The June 2014 issue features three reports on financial system initiatives: making financial benchmarks more robust; implementing the stronger Basel III capital and liquidity framework for banks; and using stress tests to assess financial system risks.

Globalization is the opportunity and the challenge of our age. It has the potential to lift billions out of poverty, vastly expand economic prospects, and develop a more diverse and resilient global economy.

We investigate the effect of inflation on output and welfare in the laboratory. Consistent with monetary theory, we find that inflation acts as a tax on monetary exchange and reduces output and welfare.

Offline functionality is a key consideration for a potential CBDC. We describe the different types of offline functionality based on their duration outside of network connection—either intermittent (for short periods) or extended (for longer periods). We discuss the advantages and drawbacks of each and consider implications for end-user devices, system resilience and universal accessibility.

We study the competition between a welfare-maximizing public payment platform (e.g., CBDC or fast payment system) and a profit-maximizing private platform in a two-sided market, deriving optimal public pricing and showing how network effects, fragmentation, and policy mandates like zero fees or cost recovery shape welfare, usage, and fee incidence.