Posts
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February 21, 2013
Conference Summary: Financial Intermediation and Vulnerabilities
The Bank of Canada’s annual economic conference, held in October 2012, brought together experts from across Canada and around the world to discuss key issues concerning financial intermediation and vulnerabilities. The conference covered such topics as household finances and their relationship to financial stability, as well as bank regulation, securitization and shadow banking. -
Understanding the Cross‐Country Effects of US Technology Shocks
Business cycles are substantially correlated across countries. Yet most existing models are not able to generate substantial transmission through international trade. We show that the nature of such transmission depends fundamentally on the features determining the responsiveness of labor supply and labor demand to international relative prices. -
Market Size and Entry in International Trade: Product Versus Firm Fixed Costs
This paper develops a theoretical framework to infer the nature of fixed costs from the relationship between entry patterns in international markets and destination market size. If fixed costs are at the firm level, firms take advantage of an intrafirm spillover by expanding firm-level product range (scope). -
Gold Prices and Inflation
Using data for 14 countries over the 1994 to 2005 period, we assess the leading indicator properties of gold at horizons ranging from 6 to 24 months. -
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February 23, 2012
Household Insolvency in Canada
With increasing levels of household debt in recent years, the number of households that may be vulnerable to a negative economic shock is rising as well. Decisions made by both the debtor and the creditor can contribute to insolvency. This article presents some stylized facts about insolvency in Canada’s household sector and analyzes the role of creditors in insolvencies. The average debt of an individual filing for bankruptcy is more than 1.5 times that of an average Canadian household; bankruptcy filers tend to be unemployed or in low-wage jobs, and are typically renters. The article reports that banks that approve more loans per branch, which is interpreted as less-intensive use of soft information (such as the loan officer’s assessment of the applicant’s character), experience more client bankruptcies. This finding has important policy implications, because financial institutions that do not use soft information risk further deterioration in their lending portfolios. -
A Distributional Approach to Realized Volatility
This paper proposes new measures of the integrated variance, measures which use high-frequency bid-ask spreads and quoted depths. The traditional approach assumes that the mid-quote is a good measure of frictionless price. -
Launching the NEUQ: The New European Union Quarterly Model, A Small Model of the Euro Area and U.K. Economies
The authors develop a projection model of the euro area and the United Kingdom. The model consists of two country blocks, endogenous to each other via the foreign demand channel. -
Assessing Global Potential Output Growth: April 2019
This note presents the updated estimates of potential output growth for the global economy through 2021. Global potential output is expected to grow by 3.3 per cent per year over the projection horizon.