E - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics

• Do Low Interest Rates Sow the Seeds of Financial Crises?

  Staff Working Paper 2011-31 Simona Cociuba, Malik Shukayev, Alexander Ueberfeldt

  A view advanced in the aftermath of the late-2000s financial crisis is that lower than optimal interest rates lead to excessive risk taking by financial intermediaries.

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Topic(s): Financial system regulation and policies, Monetary policy transmission JEL Code(s): D, D5, D53, E, E4, E44, E5, E52, G, G2, G28

• Trading Dynamics with Adverse Selection and Search: Market Freeze, Intervention and Recovery

  Staff Working Paper 2011-30 Jonathan Chiu, Thorsten Koeppl

  We study the trading dynamics in an asset market where the quality of assets is private information of the owner and finding a counterparty takes time. When trading of a financial asset ceases in equilibrium as a response to an adverse shock to asset quality, a large player can resurrect the market by buying up lemons which involves assuming financial losses.

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Topic(s): Financial markets, Financial stability JEL Code(s): E, E6, G, G1

• Financial Frictions, Financial Shocks and Labour Market Fluctuations in Canada

  Staff Discussion Paper 2011-10 Yahong Zhang

  What are the effects of financial market imperfections on unemployment and vacancies in Canada? The author estimates the model of Zhang (2011) – a standard monetary dynamic stochastic general-equilibrium model augmented with explicit financial and labour market frictions – with Canadian data for the period 1984Q2–2010Q4, and uses it to examine the importance of financial shocks on labour market fluctuations in Canada.

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff discussion papers Topic(s): Economic models, Financial markets, Labour markets JEL Code(s): E, E3, E32, E4, E44, J, J6

• The Role of Time-Varying Price Elasticities in Accounting for Volatility Changes in the Crude Oil Market

  Staff Working Paper 2011-28 Christiane Baumeister, Gert Peersman

  There has been a systematic increase in the volatility of the real price of crude oil since 1986, followed by a decline in the volatility of oil production since the early 1990s. We explore reasons for this evolution. We show that a likely explanation of this empirical fact is that both the short-run price elasticities of oil demand and of oil supply have declined considerably since the second half of the 1980s.

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Topic(s): Econometric and statistical methods, International topics JEL Code(s): E, E3, E31, E32, Q, Q4, Q43

• What Matters in Determining Capital Surcharges for Systemically Important Financial Institutions?

  Staff Discussion Paper 2011-9 Céline Gauthier, Toni Gravelle, Xuezhi Liu, Moez Souissi

  One way of internalizing the externalities that each individual bank imposes on the rest of the financial system is to impose capital surcharges on them in line with their systemic importance.

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff discussion papers Topic(s): Financial system regulation and policies JEL Code(s): C, C1, C15, C8, C81, E, E4, E44, G, G0, G01, G2, G21

• Innovation and Growth with Financial, and Other, Frictions

  Staff Working Paper 2011-25 Jonathan Chiu, Césaire Meh, Randall Wright

  The generation and implementation of ideas, or knowledge, is crucial for economic performance. We study this process in a model of endogenous growth with frictions.

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Topic(s): Economic models, Potential output, Productivity JEL Code(s): E, E4, G, G2, O, O3, O4

• How Do You Pay? The Role of Incentives at the Point-of-Sale

  Staff Working Paper 2011-23 Carlos Arango, Kim Huynh, Leonard Sabetti

  This paper uses discrete-choice models to quantify the role of consumer socioeconomic characteristics, payment instrument attributes, and transaction features on the probability of using cash, debit card, or credit card at the point-of-sale.

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Topic(s): Bank notes, Econometric and statistical methods, Financial services JEL Code(s): C, C3, C35, C8, C83, E, E4, E41

• Money and Price Posting under Private Information

  Staff Working Paper 2011-22 Mei Dong, Janet Hua Jiang

  We study price posting with undirected search in a search-theoretic monetary model with divisible money and divisible goods. Ex ante homogeneous buyers experience match specific preference shocks in bilateral trades. The shocks follow a continuous distribution and the realization of the shocks is private information.

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Topic(s): Economic models, Inflation and prices JEL Code(s): D, D8, D82, D83, E, E3, E31

• Price-Level Targeting and Inflation Expectations: Experimental Evidence

  Staff Working Paper 2011-18 Robert Amano, Jim Engle-Warnick, Malik Shukayev

  In this paper, we use an economics decision-making experiment to test a key assumption underpinning the efficacy of price-level targeting relative to inflation targeting for business cycle stabilization and mitigating the effects of the zero lower bound on nominal interest rates.

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Topic(s): Monetary policy framework JEL Code(s): E, E3, E32, E5, E52

• Analyzing Default Risk and Liquidity Demand during a Financial Crisis: The Case of Canada

  Staff Working Paper 2011-17 Jason Allen, Ali Hortaçsu, Jakub Kastl

  This paper explores the reliability of using prices of credit default swap contracts (CDS) as indicators of default probabilities during the 2007/2008 financial crisis.

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Topic(s): Financial institutions, Financial markets, Payment clearing and settlement systems JEL Code(s): E, E4, E42, E5, E58, G, G0, G01, G2, G28