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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.

Using the quantum Monte Carlo algorithm, we study whether quantum computing can improve the run time of economic applications and challenges in doing so. We apply the algorithm to two models: a stress testing bank model and a DSGE model solved with deep learning. We also present innovations in the algorithm and benchmark it to classical Monte Carlo.

In a simple two-sector New Keynesian model, sticky prices generate a counterfactual negative comovement between the output of durable and nondurable goods following a monetary policy shock. We show that heterogeneous factor markets allow any combination of strictly positive price stickiness to generate positive output comovement.

The consumption boom-bust cycle in the 2000s coincided with large fluctuations in the volume of home equity borrowing. Contrary to conventional wisdom, I show that homeowners largely borrowed for residential investment and not consumption.

Models with default options are hard to solve. We propose an extension of the endogenous grid method that solves default risk models more efficiently and accurately.

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 level of government debt in Canada relative to gross domestic product has risen steadily since the mid-1970s. Canada has not been alone in experiencing rising government indebtedness, but in comparison to other countries, Canada's debt load is now distinctly on the high side. The author reviews some of the effects of rising government debt levels on macroeconomic performance and provides some calculations aimed at illustrating their possible long-run impact on the Canadian economy. His analysis, which is based on a model of the Canadian economy used at the Bank of Canada, suggests that higher levels of government debt reduce both the level of output and the share of output that is available for domestic consumption. The central policy implication is that there are substantial benefits to halting the rise in government debt and thus preventing further erosion of consumption opportunities.

Declining labour market dynamism of workers results in an increasing wedge between their earnings and their marginal product as they age. This wedge and the demographic shift in the earnings shares of older workers can account for 59% of the decline in labor’s share of earnings in the United States.

Household debt can be an important source of vulnerability to the financial system. This technical report describes the Household Risk Assessment Model (HRAM) that has been developed at the Bank of Canada to stress test household balance sheets at the individual level.

This paper shows that regional disparities in house price growth are more pronounced during house price busts than during booms. To explain this observation we construct a two-region currency union model incorporating a housing sector and extrapolative belief updating regarding house prices. To solve the model, we propose a new method that efficiently handles extrapolative belief updating in a wide class of structural models.