Existing home sales' share of Canada's economic pie has been rising in recent years, and variation around this trend has resulted in outsized contributions to changes in real gross domestic product (GDP). In this context, we use a cointegration framework to estimate the level of resale activity...

We provide an analysis of cash trends in Canada before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. Focusing on the pandemic period, we explore the implications on demand for, use of and access to cash. We find that cash demand has been strong pre-pandemic and increased sharply during the pandemic. While...

We discuss the payment habits of Canadians both in the current payment environment and in a hypothetical cashless environment. We also consider whether a central bank digital currency (CBDC) would address unmet payment needs in a cashless society. Most adult Canadians do not experience gaps in...

Forecast combinations, also known as ensemble models, routinely require practitioners to select a model from a massive number of potential candidates. Ten explanatory variables can be grouped into 21078 forecast combinations, and the number of possibilities increases further to 21078+21078 if we...

We explore the implications of digitalization for monetary policy, both in terms of how monetary policy affects the economy and in terms of data analysis and communication with the public.

We provide empirical evidence on the impact of oil supply shocks on global aggregates. To do this, we first extract structural oil supply shocks from a standard oil-price determination model found in the literature. Impulse response functions are then estimated using local projections. This...

This paper looks at the implications for monetary policy of the widespread adoption of artificial intelligence and machine learning, which is sometimes called the "fourth industrial revolution". The paper reviews experiences from the previous three industrial revolutions, developing a template...

This note uses industry data and a unique dataset of small and medium-sized merchants to provide insights into the acquirer-merchant market in Canada. Three main findings are presented. First, smaller merchants pay their acquirer more for every dollar of card payment than larger merchants....

We use consumer surveys conducted in April, July and November 2020 to study how the COVID-19 pandemic affected the demand for cash and the use of various methods of payment. Continuing from Chen et al. (2020, 2021), we use data from the Bank Note Distribution System (BNDS) to track how the...

A new wholesale payments system will launch in Canada in 2021. This real-time gross settlement system called Lynx will have two types of settlement mechanisms, one allowing offsetting and the other not. This paper studies the decision problem of the Bank of Canada: which of the two settlement...