Given technological advances and the widespread use of the Internet, various digital currencies have emerged. In most cases, Internet platforms such as Facebook and Amazon restrict the functionality of their digital currencies to enhance the business model and maximize their profits. While...

Over the past 20 years, there has been a major shift away from the use of paper-based retail payment instruments, such as cash and cheques, toward electronic means of payment, such as debit cards and credit cards. Recent Bank of Canada research on consumers’ choice of payment instruments...

The objective of this article is to improve our understanding of counterfeiting and its policy implications by reviewing research in this area. There has been almost no empirical work on counterfeiting because of the limited availability of counterfeiting data and related statistics. The authors...

The Bank of Canada’s annual conference, held in November 2011, brought together leading researchers from universities, central banks and other institutions from around the world. Divided into four sessions plus two keynote addresses, the conference covered such topics as the use of cash and...

The Bank of Canada considers a wide range of information and analysis before making a monetary policy decision and uses carefully articulated models to produce economic projections and to examine alternative scenarios. This article describes an ongoing research agenda at the Bank to develop...