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Over the past 20 years, there has been a major shift away from the use of paper-based retail payment instruments, such as cash and cheques, toward electronic means of payment, such as debit cards and credit cards. Recent Bank of Canada research on consumers’ choice of payment instruments indicates that cash is frequently used for transactions with low values because of its speed, ease of use and wide acceptance, while debit and credit cards are more commonly used for transactions with higher values because of perceived attributes such as safety and record keeping. While innovations in retail payments currently being introduced into the Canadian marketplace could lead to a further reduction in the use of cash over the longer term, the implications for the use of cash of some of the structural and regulatory developments under way are less clear.

This article explores the role of inflation expectations in the conduct of monetary policy. It reviews the various measures of inflation expectations used by central banks, including surveys and market-based indicators, and considers their advantages and disadvantages. It examines the critical role of inflation expectations in the framework that central banks use to understand, forecast, and control inflation. It also looks at their role as an indicator of central bank credibility. The behaviour of inflation expectations over the past two years is analyzed and policy conclusions are offered.

Financial frictions affect how much consumers spend on durable and non-durable goods. Borrowers can face both loan-to-value (LTV) constraints and payment-to-income (PTI) constraints.

Senior Deputy Governor Carolyn A. Wilkins discusses developments in the Canadian labour market and factors that may help explain why wage growth is slower than expected.

Immigrants can increase international trade by shifting preferences towards the goods of their country of origin and by reducing bilateral transaction costs. Using geographical variation across U.S. states for the period 2008 to 2013, I estimate the respective causal impact of immigrants on U.S. exports and imports.

Occupations held by females with mid-level education face the highest risk of accelerated automation as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.

This paper studies how the allocation of residual losses affects trading and welfare in a central counterparty. I compare loss sharing under two loss-allocation mechanisms – variation margin haircutting and cash calls – and study the privately and socially optimal degree of loss sharing.

An anonymous token-based central bank digital currency (CBDC) would pose certain security risks to users. These risks arise from how balances are aggregated, from their transactional use and from the competition between suppliers of aggregation solutions.

We explore the long-run effects of a monetary policy shock in a Heterogeneous Agent New Keynesian model built on the micro evidence that job losses lead to persistently lower individual earnings through a combination of skill decay and abandonment of the labour force.

In the field of economics, on average, women tend to produce fewer research articles and be cited less often than men. But this appears to be changing. A newly compiled dataset about scholars at top universities around the world helps us identify where individual gender gaps exist.