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A blockchain is a digital ledger that keeps track of a record of ownership without the need for a designated party to update and enforce changes to the record. The updating of the ledger is done directly by the users of the blockchain and is traditionally governed by a proof-of-work (PoW) protocol.

We explore quantitative and qualitative information about Canadians who face barriers to making digital payments. We also consider the implications of ongoing digitalization for modern financial inclusion and a potential central bank digital currency.

Changes in survey mode (e.g., online, offline) may influence the values of survey responses, and may be particularly problematic when comparing repeated cross-sectional surveys.

Advances in variance analysis permit the splitting of the total quadratic variation of a jump diffusion process into upside and downside components. Recent studies establish that this decomposition enhances volatility predictions, and highlight the upside/downside variance spread as a driver of the asymmetry in stock price distributions.

This issue features a summary of the Bank’s annual conference, Financial Intermediation and Vulnerabilities, which took place in October 2012, as well as two articles that present analysis of international macroeconomic coordination since the global financial crisis and the U.S. recovery from the Great Recession.

Capital markets and their related financial instruments make an important contribution to the welfare of Canadians. The Bank of Canada is interested in the efficient functioning of capital markets through each of its responsibilities for monetary policy, the financial system, and funds management. Hendry and King highlight the key findings of Bank research published over the past year that addresses capital market efficiency and summarize lessons that have been learned. The research conducted thus far suggests that Canadian capital markets are efficient for a capital market of Canada's size but are less diverse than the U.S. capital markets, indicating that there is room for improvement in certain areas.

This paper documents the properties of Government of Canada securities in cash, repo and securities lending transactions over their life cycle. By tracking every security from issuance to maturity, we are able to highlight inter-linkages between the markets for cash and for specific securities.

We estimate an aggregate elasticity of substitution between capital and labor near or below one, which implies that capital deepening cannot explain the global decline in labor's share. Our methodology derives from transition paths in the neo-classical growth model.

During the recent financial crisis, one of the forces set in motion by the initial losses on subprime-mortgage loans was a significant decline in the market liquidity of assets and in the ability of financial institutions to obtain funding in wholesale markets. In this article, the authors summarize recent research that clarifies the role of liquidity in destabilizing the financial system and examine the implications of this research for the recently announced financial system reforms, including Basel III.

Using two complementary approaches, we investigate the importance of U.S. macroeconomic news in driving low-frequency fluctuations in the term structure of interest rates in Canada, Sweden and the United Kingdom. We find that U.S. macroeconomic news is particularly important to explain changes in the expectation components of the nominal, real and break-even inflation rates of small open economies.