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Oracles are constructs used in decentralized finance to price assets relative to each other. However, oracles contain defects that could lead to manipulation attacks. Such attacks exploit pricing models embedded within oracles to defraud creators and users. We automatically verify defects, which if mitigated, improves the security of digital currency.

This article reviews selected papers that use machine learning for economics research and policy analysis. Our review highlights when machine learning is used in economics, the commonly preferred models and how those models are used.

The Bank of Canada 2015 Retailer Survey on the Cost of Payment Methods faced low response rates and outliers in sample data for two of its retailer strata: chains and large independent businesses. This technical report investigates whether it is appropriate to combine these two strata to produce more accurate estimates of the total private cost to large businesses of the main payment methods.

We estimate a continuous-time model with stochastic volatility and dynamic crash probability for the S&P 500 index and find that market illiquidity dominates other factors in explaining the stock market crash risk. While the crash probability is time-varying, its dynamic depends only weakly on return variance once we include market illiquidity as an economic variable in the model.

We construct and estimate a structural two-stage model of equilibrium in a market for payments in order to quantify the network externalities and identify the main determinants of consumer and merchant decisions.

The official consumer price index (CPI) inflation measure, based on a fixed basket set before the COVID 19 pandemic, may not fully reflect what consumers are currently experiencing. We partnered with Statistics Canada to construct a more representative index for the pandemic with weights based on real-time transaction and survey data.

We provide an analysis of cash trends in Canada before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. We also consider the potential two scenarios for issuance of a central bank digital currency in Canada: the emergence of a cashless society or the widespread use of an alternative digital currency in Canada. Finally, we discuss the Canadian experience in maintaining cash as an efficient and accessible method of payment and store of value.

We study a novel policy tool—interest rate uncertainty—that can be used to discourage inefficient capital inflows and to adjust the composition of external account between shortterm securities and foreign direct investment (FDI).

This paper measures how both geographical and cultural proximity of bank branches affect household credit choice and pricing. For credit products that require high levels of ex-ante screening, we find that both proximities can complement each other in reducing the cost of providing soft information, thereby increasing credit access.

The classical dichotomy predicts that all of the time-series variance in the aggregate real exchange rate is accounted for by non-traded goods in the consumer price index (CPI) basket because traded goods obey the Law of One Price. In stark contrast, Engel (1999) claimed the opposite: that traded goods accounted for all of the variance.