Research
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Canadian Labour Market Dispersion: Mind the (Shrinking) Gap
Shocks to a currency area can and often do have asymmetric impacts on its regions that, in the absence of perfect labour mobility, lead to gaps in relative labour market performance. Witness, for example, the effects of the 2008/09 recession and subsequent financial crisis in Europe on the dispersion of employment rates across the euro area – and to a lesser extent the United States. -
Government Corruption and Foreign Direct Investment Under the Threat of Expropriation
Foreign investment is often constrained by two forms of political risk: expropriation and corruption. We examine the role of government corruption in foreign direct investment (FDI) when contracts are not fully transparent and investors face the threat of expropriation. -
Capital Structure, Pay Structure and Job Termination
We develop a model to analyze the link between financial leverage, worker pay structure and the risk of job termination. Contrary to the conventional view, we show that even in the absence of any agency problem among workers, variable pay can be optimal despite workers being risk averse and firms risk neutral. -
Dating Systemic Financial Stress Episodes in the EU Countries
This paper introduces a new methodology to date systemic financial stress events in a transparent, objective and reproducible way. The financial cycle is captured by a monthly country-specific financial stress index. -
Measuring Systemic Risk Across Financial Market Infrastructures
We measure systemic risk in the network of financial market infrastructures (FMIs) as the probability that two or more FMIs have a large credit risk exposure to the same FMI participant. -
Predictive Ability of Commodity Prices for the Canadian Dollar
Recent sharp declines in commodity prices and the simultaneous depreciation of the Canadian dollar (CAD) relative to the U.S. dollar (USD) have rekindled an interest in the relationship between commodity prices and the CAD-USD exchange rate. -
A Framework in Search of an Optimal Margining Policy for Official Institutions: The Canadian Experience
One of the main outcomes of the global financial crisis has been a series of new regulations imposed on the financial system and specifically on banks. -
Canadian Repo Market Ecology
This is the first of the Financial Markets Department’s descriptions of Canadian financial industrial organization. The document discusses the organization of the repurchase-agreement (repo) market in Canada. -
The Dynamics of Capital Flow Episodes
This paper proposes a novel methodology for identifying episodes of strong capital flows based on a regime-switching model. In comparison with the existing literature, a key advantage of our methodology is to estimate capital flow regimes without the need for context- and sample-specific assumptions.