We provide an analysis of cash trends in Canada before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. Focusing on the pandemic period, we explore the implications on demand for, use of and access to cash. We find that cash demand has been strong pre-pandemic and increased sharply during the pandemic. While...

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...

Consumer spending declined significantly during the recent COVID-19 pandemic. This negative shock likely reduced spending across all methods of payment (cash, debit, credit, etc.). As well, the mix of payment methods that consumers use could also be affected. This paper is a first step in...

The role of cash in Canadians' lives has been evolving, as innovations in digital payments have become more widely adopted over the past decade. The emergence of privately issued digital currencies has motivated many central banks to conduct research into central bank digital currencies (CBDCs)....

The Bank of Canada commissioned the Bitcoin Omnibus Survey in 2016 to monitor trends in the adoption and use of Bitcoin and other cryptoassets (Henry, Huynh and Nicholls 2018, 2019). This report presents findings from the latest iteration of the survey, which was conducted in 2018. We find that...

We use consumer surveys conducted in April, July and November 2020 to study how the COVID-19 pandemic affected the demand for cash and the use of various methods of payment. Continuing from Chen et al. (2020, 2021), we use data from the Bank Note Distribution System (BNDS) to track how 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...

In recent years, there have been rapid technological innovations in retail payments. Such dramatic changes in the economics of payment systems have led to questions regarding whether there is consumer demand for cash. The entry of these new products and services has resulted in significant...

The market for payment cards is inherently two sided. Consumers benefit from increased merchant acceptance of payment cards and vice versa. To quantify the interdependence of consumer and merchants or network externalities, we construct and estimate a structural two-sided model of a payment...