Constructing a novel micro-geographic individual-level data set, we study the relevance of shoe-leather costs on cash withdrawals. An unexplored issue in the literature is the consistent estimation of the marginal effect of travel distance on withdrawals when a fraction of unobserved withdrawals...

I investigate the impact of contactless credit cards (CTCs) on cash use in Canada, using panel data between 2010 and 2017. I show that ignoring unobserved heterogeneity would lead to overstating the impact of CTCs on cash usage in a linear model. Using finite mixture modelling, I provide...

Mobile phones are ubiquitous around the world, making them obvious conduits for innovative payment technologies, or mobile payments. In Canada, five out of six adults regularly use a mobile phone. However, they have not started to use mobile payments at the same rate as other payment...

Since 2016, the Bank of Canada has conducted annual surveys to monitor awareness, adoption and usage of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies (Henry et al. 2018, 2019a, 2019b). This report incorporates results from the 2019 Bitcoin Omnibus Survey and the November 2020 Cash Alternative Survey. We...

We provide an update on cryptoasset ownership in Canada using data from the Bitcoin Omnibus Survey conducted in late 2023. Bitcoin ownership remained stable at around 10% in 2023 and continues to be concentrated among men, younger individuals and those with higher income and levels of education....

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...

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...