Search

In 2015, the Bank of Canada surveyed merchants and found that cash was nearly universally accepted (Fung, Huynh and Kosse 2017). Since 2015, retail payments in Canada have become increasingly digitalized, as many Canadians have adopted digital payment innovations like contactless cards and Interac e-Transfer.

This paper uses trivariate generalized autoregressive conditional heteroscedasticity (GARCH) models to study price and volatility spillovers between the foreign exchange and associated money markets. Three models are estimated using data on U.S. dollar/Canadian dollar, U.S. dollar/Deutsche mark, and U.S. dollar/Japanese yen daily exchange rate returns together with returns on 90-day Eurodollar, Euro Canada, Euromark, and Euroyen deposits.

In continental Europe, labour shares in national income have exhibited considerable variation since 1970. Empirical and theoretical research suggests that the evolution of labour markets and labour market imperfections can, in part, explain this phenomenon.

Canada has continued to lose market share in the United States since the Great Recession, beyond what our bilateral competitiveness measures (relative unit labour costs) would suggest.

What risks could stablecoins pose to the financial system? We argue that the stabilization mechanisms of stablecoins give rise to the risk of confidence runs, which can propagate to broader cryptoasset markets and the traditional financial sector. We also argue that stablecoins can contribute to financial stability risks by facilitating the buildup of leverage and liquidity mismatch in decentralized finance. Such risks cannot be addressed by ensuring the price stability of stablecoins alone. Finally, we explore the potential implications of stablecoins for the current system of bank-intermediated credit and for monetary policy.

Repeated interactions between borrowers and lenders create the possibility of dynamic pricing: lenders compete aggressively with low prices to attract new borrowers and then raise their prices once borrowers have made a commitment. We find such pricing patterns in the Canadian mortgage market.

As an economist who worked as a banker for most of his career, Douglas Gibson brought an interesting perspective to public policy issues, to the relationship between government and business, and to the contribution of outside economists to government policies.

After 10 years of impressive growth, India is now the fourth largest economy in the world. Yet, to date, India's impact on global commodity markets has been muted. The authors examine how India's domestic and trade policies have distorted and constrained its demand for commodities.

This article examines the recent proposition that the decline in Canada's standard of living relative to that of the United States is causally related to the decline in our exchange rate. The authors explore the main channels through which the exchange rate and the standard of living could be related—productivity and the terms of trade—focusing mainly on productivity. They conclude that the decline in world commodity prices and weak demand for domestic output were affecting both Canada's standard of living and the exchange rate and that the flexible exchange rate regime itself did not play an independent role.

When constrained by the zero lower bound, some central banks have communicated a threshold that must be met before short-term interest rates would be permitted to rise. Simulation results for Canada show that forward guidance that is conditional on achieving a price-level threshold can theoretically raise demand and inflation expectations by significantly more than unemployment thresholds. This superior performance is attributable to the fact that the price-level threshold depends on past inflation outcomes. In practice, however, history-dependent thresholds such as this might be more challenging for central banks to communicate.