E4 - Money and Interest Rates
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Should Banks Be Worried About Dividend Restrictions?
A regulator would want to restrict dividends to force banks to rebuild capital during a crisis. But such a policy is not time-consistent. A time-consistent policy would let banks gradually rebuild capital and pay dividends even when their equity remains below pre-crisis levels. -
Tattle-tails: Gauging downside risks using option prices
Options markets offer unique insights into the changing risks different assets face, which helps us better understand the broader risks to the Canadian economy. We show how option prices help reveal that investors did not anticipate large downside risks to either major Canadian banks or economic growth during the March 2023 financial sector system stress, a period when policy-makers and investors were unsure of what the future held for Canada’s economy. -
Forecasting Risks to the Canadian Economic Outlook at a Daily Frequency
This paper quantifies tail risks in the outlooks for Canadian inflation and real GDP growth by estimating their conditional distributions at a daily frequency. We show that the tail risk probabilities derived from the conditional distributions accurately reflect realized outcomes during the sample period from 2002 to 2022. -
A Behavioral New Keynesian Model of a Small Open Economy Under Limited Foresight
This paper studies exchange rate dynamics by incorporating bounded rationality, that is, limited foresight, in a small open-economy model. This behavior of limited foresight helps explain several observations and puzzles in the data of exchange rate movements. -
Unmet Payment Needs and a Central Bank Digital Currency
We discuss the payment habits of Canadians both in the current payment environment and in a hypothetical cashless environment. -
Is Money Essential? An Experimental Approach
Monetary theory says that money is essential if it helps to achieve better incentive-feasible outcomes. We test this in the laboratory. -
It takes a panel to predict the future: What the stock market says about future economic growth in Canada
Valuation ratios in the Canadian stock market can help reveal investors’ expectations about future economic growth because the impact of economic growth on valuation ratios can vary across industries. We find that this variation helps produce accurate forecasts of future growth of real gross domestic product in Canada. The forecasts from our model declined by just over 3 percentage points between January 2022 and February 2023—a period when the Bank of Canada rapidly increased the overnight rate. As well, we find that interest-rate-sensitive industries had an outsized contribution to this expected slowdown in growth. -
Cryptoasset Ownership and Use in Canada: An Update for 2022
We find that Bitcoin ownership declined from 13% in 2021 to 10% in 2022. This drop occurred against a background of steep price declines and an increasingly tight regulatory atmosphere. -
Monetary Policy Transmission, Bank Market Power, and Wholesale Funding Reliance
I study how banking market concentration and reliance on wholesale funding affect monetary policy transmission to mortgage rates. I find that this transmission is imperfect and dampens the response of consumption, output, and housing prices.