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Our paper employs smartphone data to construct an improved cash access metric by accounting for both spatial agglomeration and households’ travel patterns. We find that incorporating trip-chaining into the travel metric could show that travel costs are from 15 to 25% less than not incorporating trip-chaining and that the biggest decrease is driven by rural residents.

The authors construct three financial conditions indexes (FCIs) for Canada based on three approaches: an IS-curve-based model, generalized impulse-response functions, and factor analysis.

This paper examines the empirical performance of alternatives to the monetary aggregates currently published by the Bank of Canada. The results show that real M1 and real M1a perform about equally well in providing leading information about real output at short horizons. However, on theoretical grounds, M1a is a more attractive aggregate, since it excludes […]

This paper evaluates linear and non-linear forecast-combination methods. Among the non-linear methods, we propose a nonparametric kernel-regression weighting approach that allows maximum flexibility of the weighting parameters.

The primary focus of this paper is to study conflict of interest in the brokerage market. Brokers face a conflict of interest when the commissions they receive from investors differ from the costs imposed by different trading venues.

The lack of consolidated Canadian micro data on household balance sheets and expenditures has been an important impediment to empirical research into real-financial linkages in the Canadian household sector. Our paper attempts to fill this data gap by merging household balance sheet data from the Canadian Financial Monitor survey with household expenditure data from the Survey of Household Spending.

This paper studies the implications of model uncertainty for wealth distribution in a tractable general equilibrium model with a borrowing constraint and robustness à la Hansen and Sargent (2008). Households confront model uncertainty about the process driving the return of the risky asset, and they choose robust policies.

Financial and monetary variables have long been known to contain useful leading information regarding economic activity. In this paper, the authors wish to determine whether the forecasting performance of such variables can be improved using neural network models. The main findings are that, at the 1-quarter forecasting horizon, neural networks yield no significant forecast improvements. […]

The financial system makes an important contribution to the welfare of all Canadians. The ability of households and firms to confidently hold and transfer financial assets is one of the fundamental building blocks of the Canadian economy.