Countercyclical bank capital requirements have emerged as a popular regulatory tool to help smooth financial cycles. The idea is to reduce capital requirements when exogenous shocks cause aggregate bank capital to decrease so that regulation does not needlessly constrain banks' supply of credit....

We present an incomplete markets model to understand the costs and benefits of increasing government debt when an increased demand for safety pushes the natural rate of interest below zero. A higher demand for safe assets causes the ZLB to bind, increasing unemployment. Higher government debt...

In this paper, we study how the impact of a cyber-attack that paralyzes one or multiple banks' ability to send payments would transmit to other banks through the Canadian wholesale payments system. Based on historical payment data, we simulate a wide range of scenarios and evaluate the total...

We estimate the effect of Bitcoin ownership on the level of cash holdings of Canadian consumers. Bitcoin ownership positively correlates with cash holdings even after accounting for selection into ownership via a control function approach. On average, Bitcoin owners hold 83 percent (in 2018) to...

This report studies the dynamics of Bitcoin awareness and ownership from 2016 to 2021, using the Bank of Canada's Bitcoin Omnibus Surveys (BTCOS). In 2021, Canadians' awareness of Bitcoin remained stable at about 90%, while ownership increased to 13% from the 5% observed in 2018-2020. Canadian...

We build a tractable New Keynesian model to study four types of monetary and fiscal policy. We find that quantitative easing (QE), lump-sum fiscal transfers, and government spending have the same effects on the aggregate economy when fiscal policy is fully tax financed. Compared with these three...

Digital payments and decentralized systems enable the creation of new financial products and services for users. One core challenge in digital payments is the need to protect users from fraud and abuse while retaining privacy in individual transactions. We propose a pseudonymous credential...

Monetary exchange is deemed essential when better incentive-compatible outcomes can be achieved with money than without it. We study essentiality both theoretically and experimentally, using finite-horizon monetary models that are naturally suited to the lab. We also follow the mechanism design...

An anonymous credential mechanism is a set of protocols that allows users to obtain credentials from an organization and demonstrate ownership of these credentials without compromising users' privacy. In this work, we construct the first secret-free and quantum-safe credential mechanism. The...

There has been tremendous discussion of Bitcoin, digital currencies and FinTech. However, there is limited empirical evidence of Bitcoin's adoption and usage. We propose a methodology to collect a nationally representative sample using the Bitcoin Omnibus Survey (BTCOS) to track the ubiquity and...