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Since the creation of Bitcoin in 2009, over 2,000 cryptocurrencies have been issued. We evaluate how well a cryptocurrency functions as a payment system.

The scale of safe assets suggests a structural demand for a safe wealth share beyond transaction and liquidity roles. We study how investors achieve a reference wealth level by combining self-insurance and contingent liquidation of investment. Intermediaries improve upon autarky, insuring investors with poor self-insurance and limiting liquidation.

How do import tariffs affect retail prices? We combine daily product-level posted prices from seven major Canadian retailers with product-level tariff exposure to estimate tariff effects. Prices of tariffed goods rose gradually, peaking at 6% after three months, implying pass-through of roughly one quarter of the 25% tariff.

Initial coin offerings (ICOs) are a new mode of financing start-ups that saw an explosion in popularity in 2017 but declined in popularity in the second half of 2018 as regulatory pressure, instances of fraud and reports of poor performance began to undermine their reputation.

ToTEM III is the most recent generation of the Bank of Canada’s main dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model for projection and policy analysis. The model helps Bank staff tell clear and coherent stories about the Canadian economy’s current state and future evolution.

Recent findings on the term structure of equity and bond yields pose serious challenges to existing models of equilibrium asset pricing. This paper presents a new equilibrium model of subjective expectations to explain the joint historical dynamics of equity and bond yields (and their yield spreads).

This paper proposes a unique approach to simulate intraday transactions in the Canadian retail payments batch system when such transactions are unobtainable. The simulation procedure has potential for helping with data-deficient problems where only high-level aggregate information is available.

The optimal currency literature has stressed the importance of labor mobility as a precondition for the success of monetary unions. But only a few studies formally link labor mobility to macroeconomic adjustment and policy. In this paper, we study macroeconomic dynamics and optimal monetary policy in an economy with cyclical labor flows across two distinct regions that share trade links and a common monetary framework.

Canada plans to adopt a retail payment system to allow Canadians to pay in real time (or near real time) 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. However, the traditional model for setting the overnight interest rate does not operate 24/7.

The elimination of long-term contracts and early termination fees (ETFs) in the US wireless industry at the end of 2015 increased monthly service fees by 2 to 5 percent. Nevertheless, consumers are clearly better off without ETFs. While firms’ revenues from ETFs vanish, their profits from monthly fees increase. As a result, the overall effect on producer profits is less clear.