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This paper looks at the role mortgage brokers play in helping borrowers generate quotes and qualify for credit. We find that, on average, borrowers that engage with a mortgage broker pay lower interest rates. However, in about 15% of cases, borrowers are steered towards longer amortizing mortgages than they would have chosen absent a broker. Since mortgages with longer amortization have higher total interest costs over the entire life of the mortgage, this steering is expensive.

We consider introducing an expiry date for offline digital currency balances. Consumers whose digital cash expired would automatically receive the funds back into their online account. This functionality could increase demand for digital cash, with the time to expiry playing a key role.

The discrete choice to adopt a financial innovation affects a household’s exposure to inflation and transactions costs. We model this adoption decision as being subject to an unobserved cost.

Bank resolution is costly. In the United States, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) typically resolves failing banks by auction.

How does the supply of nominal government debt affect the macroeconomy? To answer this question, we propose a portfolio-balance model of the yield curve in which inflation is determined through an interest rate rule.

This paper studies how fraud prevention should be organized in instant payment systems. It compares centralized and decentralized governance, showing how access pricing, payment eligibility, prevention incentives, and liability allocation jointly determine fraud risk and the set of payments admitted to the system.

This paper develops a general equilibrium model to assess central bank digital currency (CBDC) design in a monetary system where traditional banks and “crypto banks” (i.e., banks that issue stablecoins) coexist. We compare tokenized and non-tokenized CBDC, showing that their desirability depends on the reliability of private money provision, the availability of collateral assets and the features of the crypto sector.

How much of a CBDC would Canadian households want to hold, and what design features of a CBDC would they care about?

We perform an analysis to determine how well the introduction of a countercyclical loanto- value (LTV) ratio can reduce household indebtedness and housing price fluctuations compared with a monetary policy rule augmented with house price inflation.

Business cycles are substantially correlated across countries. Yet most existing models are not able to generate substantial transmission through international trade. We show that the nature of such transmission depends fundamentally on the features determining the responsiveness of labor supply and labor demand to international relative prices.