This paper develops a travel-based metric to measure Canadians' access to cash from automated banking machines (ABMs) and financial institution branches. Our findings indicate that the average distance Canadians need to travel to reach the nearest ABM is 2.0 km, while the average distance to the...

We conduct a follow-up to Chen et al. (2020) and study demand for and use of cash after the containment measures imposed at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic were relaxed during the summer of 2020. We find that bank notes in circulation continued to rise in July due to ongoing cash...

Providing bank notes is one of the Bank of Canada's core functions. The Bank is therefore interested in whether cash is adequately distributed across society, and this also influences the Bank's thinking on issuing a central bank digital currency. We provide a perspective on these issues by...

Chen et al. (2021) show that almost one-third of First Nations band offices in Canada are within 1 kilometre (km) of an automated banking machine (ABM) or financial institution (FI) branch and more than half are within 5 km. Further, over three-quarters of band offices are within 20 km of an ABM...

We exploit the panel dimension of the Canadian Financial Monitor (CFM) data to estimate the impact of retail payment innovations on cash usage. We estimate a semiparametric panel data model that accounts for unobserved heterogeneity and allows for general forms of non-random attrition. We use...

Cash is the preferred method of payment for small value transactions generally less than $25. We provide insight to this finding with a new theoretical model that characterizes and compares consumers' costs of paying with cash to paying with cards for each transaction. Our novel method accounts...