Digital currencies have attracted strong interest in recent years and have the potential to become widely adopted for use in making payments. Public authorities and central banks around the world are closely monitoring developments in digital currencies and studying their implications for the...

The authors review recent developments in retail payments in Canada and elsewhere, with a focus on e-money products, and assess their potential public policy implications. In particular, they study how these developments will affect the demand for bank notes, and the central bank's balance sheet...

Many predict that innovations in retail payment may render cash obsolete. We investigate this possibility in the context of recent payment innovations such as contactless-credit and stored-value cards. We apply causal inference methods on the 2009 Bank of Canada Method of Payment survey, a...

I provide a quantitative interpretation of financial intermediation in the U.S. over the past 130 years. Measuring separately the cost of intermediation and the production of financial services, I find that: (i) the quantity of intermediation varies a lot over time; (ii) intermediation is...