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We analyze the value proposition and limitations of decentralized finance (DeFi). Based on a distributed ledger and smart contracts, DeFi can guarantee the execution of financial contracts, potentially lowering the costs of intermediation and improving financial inclusion.

We introduce a new class of time-varying parameter vector autoregressions (TVP-VARs) where the identified structural innovations are allowed to influence — contemporaneously and with a lag — the dynamics of the intercept and autoregressive coefficients in these models.

When players repeatedly face an identical or similar game (e.g., coordination game, technology adoption game, or product choice game), they may learn through experience to perform better in the future. This learning behaviour has important economic implications.

Privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs) could offer solutions to safeguard end-user privacy and meet rigorous data protection standards for central bank digital currencies. We consider how PETs can transform privacy design in financial systems and the implications of their broader adoption.

Using proprietary FXC Intelligence data on quoted prices for Canadian business-to-business cross-border payments, this note finds that banks charge firms around 2–3.5% of transaction value. Prices vary considerably across banks for the same corridor, transaction amount, and year.

In 1991, Canada became the second country to adopt an inflation target as a central pillar of its monetary policy framework. The regime has proven much more successful than initially expected, both in achieving price stability and in stabilizing the real economy against a wide range of shocks.

The neutral rate serves as a benchmark for measuring monetary stimulus and provides a medium- to long-run anchor for the real policy rate. Global neutral rate estimates have been falling over the past few decades. Factors such as population aging, high corporate savings, and low trend productivity growth are likely to continue supporting a low global neutral rate. These global factors as well as domestic factors are exerting downward pres-sure on the Canadian real neutral rate, which is estimated to be between 0.5 to 1.5 per cent. This low neutral rate has important implications for monetary policy and financial stability.

The uncertainty regarding inflation that is observed in density forecasts of households and professionals helps macroeconomists understand the formation mechanism of inflation expectations. Shocks to inflation take time to be perceived by all agents in the economy, and such rigidity is lower in a high-inflation environment.

How do a country’s exports change when its currency depreciates? Does it matter which forces drive the exchange rate deprecation in the first place? We find that this relationship varies greatly depending on what drives exchange rate movements, and we conclude that the direct relationship between the exchange rate and exports is weak for Canada.

We present a simple model to study the risk sensitivity of capital regulation. A banker funds investment with uninsured deposits and costly capital, where capital resolves a moral hazard problem in the banker’s choice of risk.