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

This paper studies the use of information for incentives and risk sharing in agency problems. When the principal is risk neutral or the outcome is contractible, risk sharing is unnecessary or completely taken care of by a contract on the outcome.

Should unemployment benefits be more generous during economic downturns? The optimal amount and duration of benefit payments ultimately depend on the demographic and wealth characteristics of benefit recipients.

We build a tractable New Keynesian model to study and compare four types of monetary and fiscal policy: policy rate adjustments, quantitative easing, lump-sum fiscal transfers and government spending. We find that tax-financed fiscal policy is more stimulative than debt-financed policy, and optimal policy coordination needs at least two of these four policy instruments.

Can regulation solve problems arising from a natural monopoly? This paper analyzes whether “unbundling,” referring to regulations that enforce sharing of natural monopolistic infrastructure, prevents entrants from building new infrastructure.

This paper shows point identification in first-price auction models with risk aversion and unobserved auction heterogeneity by exploiting multiple bids from each auction and variation in the number of bidders. The required exclusion restriction is shown to be consistent with a large class of entry models.

The magnitude and frequency of recent financial crises underscore the importance of understanding financial instability for the purpose of crisis prevention and crisis management.

From 1870 to 2000, the workweek length of employed persons decreased by 41 per cent in industrialized countries.

We study the labour market and welfare effects of expanding unemployment insurance benefits and introducing payroll subsidies during the COVID-19 pandemic. We find that both policies are complementary and are beneficial to different types of workers. Payroll subsidies preserve the employment of workers in highly productive jobs, while unemployment insurance replaces lost income for workers who experience inevitable job loss.

Real rigidities are an important feature of modern sticky price models and are policy-relevant because of their welfare consequences, but cannot be structurally identified from time series. I evaluate the plausibility of capital specificity as a source of real rigidities using a two-dimensional generalized (s,S) model calibrated to micro evidence.