Financial stability
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Price Level Targeting in a Small Open Economy with Financial Frictions: Welfare Analysis
How important are the benefits of low price-level uncertainty? This paper explores the desirability of price-level path targeting in an estimated DSGE model fit to Canadian data. The policy implications are based on social welfare evaluations. -
The Impact of Sovereign Wealth Funds on International Financial Stability
Over the recent period, many emerging-market economies and commodity-exporting nations have experienced unprecedented growth and accumulated substantial amounts of foreign exchange reserves. The management of these foreign reserves has led to the emergence of important financial actors: sovereign wealth funds (SWFs). -
Non-Linearities, Model Uncertainty, and Macro Stress Testing
A distinguishing feature of macro stress testing exercises is the use of macroeconomic models in scenario design and implementation. It is widely agreed that scenarios should be based on "rare but plausible" events that have either resulted in vulnerabilities in the past or could do so in the future. -
Good Policies or Good Fortune: What Drives the Compression in Emerging Market Spreads?
Since 2002, spreads on emerging market sovereign debt have fallen to historical lows. Given the close links between sovereign spreads, capital flows to emerging markets, and economic growth, understanding the factors driving these spreads is very important. We address this issue in two stages. -
June 17, 2008
A Tool for Assessing Financial Vulnerabilities in the Household Sector
In this article, the authors build on the framework used in the Bank of Canada's Financial System Review to assess the evolution of household indebtedness and financial vulnerabilities in response to changing economic conditions. To achieve this, they first compare two microdata sets generated by Ipsos Reid's Canadian Financial Monitor and Statistics Canada's Survey of Financial Security. They find that the surveys are broadly comparable, despite methodological differences. This enables them to use the combined information content for the identification of the threshold value of the debt-service ratio (DSR). The article then presents an innovative framework that uses household-level microdata to simulate changes in the distribution of the DSR under various stress scenarios. The authors show how this framework can be used by analyzing the effects of two different scenarios on the distribution of the debt-service ratio and the impact on vulnerable households. This tool will enable researchers to refine their analyses of current risks to the financial health of Canadian households. The article concludes with comments on future directions for refining the Bank's analyses of household sector risk. -
The Effects of a Disruption in CDSX Settlement on Activity in the LVTS: A Simulation Study
The Large Value Transfer System (LVTS) for settling large payments, and CDSX for settling debt and equity trades, are two of the main settlement systems in Canada. They are closely linked; for example, at the end of the day the final CDSX payment obligations must settle on the Bank of Canada's books, with payments made […] -
Credit, Asset Prices, and Financial Stress in Canada
Historical narratives typically associate financial crises with credit expansions and asset price misalignments. The question is whether some combination of measures of credit and asset prices can be used to predict these events. -
Sterilized Intervention in Emerging-Market Economies: Trends, Costs, and Risks
The author examines recent trends in sterilized intervention among emerging-market economies, to determine the size and extent of this policy in relation to earlier periods of heavy reserve accumulation. He then analyzes whether the domestic costs and risks of substantial and prolonged sterilization are beginning to manifest themselves. -
March 16, 2008
Developing a Framework to Assess Financial Stability: Conference Highlights and Lessons
Central banks are still defining their approach to financial stability and are at an early stage in the development of useful models. The Bank of Canada's 2007 economic conference was organized to stimulate progress in the development of financial-stability frameworks. Among the highlights reported here are the discussions centred around three proposed frameworks: a contingent-claims-analysis framework, a semi-structural framework, and structural financial-stability models. Participants also reported on their experiences with stress-testing under the International Monetary Fund's Financial Sector Assessment Program and discussed the implications for financial stability of linkages among payment, clearing, and settlement systems.