Assessing the state of the economy in real time is critical for policy-making, and understanding the risks to those assessments is equally important. Policy-makers are typically provided with point forecasts that contain insufficient information about risks. In contrast, predictive densities...

We provide an update on the impact the COVID-19 pandemic on the demand for cash and the use of methods of payment based on data from the Bank Note Distribution System and from consumer surveys conducted in April and August 2021. Our key findings are as follows: Cash in circulation remained high...

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...

Models with structured additive predictor provide a very broad and rich framework for complex regression modeling. They can deal simultaneously with nonlinear covariate effects and time trends, unit- or cluster specific heterogeneity, spatial heterogeneity and complex interactions between...

Reproducibility of economic research has attracted considerable attention in recent years. So far, the discussion has focused on reproducibility of empirical analyses. This paper addresses a further aspect of reproducibility, the reproducibility of computational experiments. We examine the...

Computational methods both open the frontiers of economic analysis and serve as a bottleneck in what can be achieved. Using the quantum Monte Carlo (QMC) algorithm, we are the first to study whether quantum computing can improve the run time of economic applications and challenges in doing so....

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....

This article proposes a strategy to identify Syrian refugees in Turkey's Household Labour Force Survey (HLFS). Even though Turkey's HLFS contains information on the migrants' year of arrival to Turkey, it does not provide details on their nationalities. This unfortunate feature mixes Syrian...

This paper presents simulation results for Canada's new large-value payments system: Lynx. We simulate the settlement process of Lynx using a large sample of payments observed in the current system (LVTS), taking the initial level of liquidity as given. We calculate the resulting liquidity...

Interconnectedness is an inherent feature of the modern financial system. While it contributes to efficiency of financial services, it also creates structural vulnerabilities: pernicious shock transmission and amplification impacting banks' capitalization. This has recently been seen during the...