Posts
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The Side Effects of Safe Asset Creation
The secular decline in real interest rates has created a challenge for monetary policy, now confronting the zero lower bound more often. An increase in the supply of safe assets reduces downward pressure on the natural interest rate. This allows monetary policy to reach price stability and full employment, but not without cost—permanently lower investment. -
Financial Intermediation and Fire Sales with Liquidity Risk Pricing
We provide a theory of fire sales in which potential buyers are subject to liquidity shocks and frictions that limit their ability to resell assets. Viewed through the lens of the model, the liquidity requirements proposed by the U. S. Securities and Exchange Commission for these intermediaries could hurt the economy. -
June 18, 2018
Rebooting Reference Rates
Deputy Governor Lynn Patterson discusses the efforts in multiple jurisdictions to strengthen LIBOR and similar benchmarks and work underway in Canada to consider a new risk-free benchmark for the Canadian dollar market. -
Mixed Frequency Forecasts for Chinese GDP
We evaluate different approaches for using monthly indicators to predict Chinese GDP for the current and the next quarter (‘nowcasts’ and ‘forecasts’, respectively). We use three types of mixed-frequency models, one based on an economic activity indicator (Liu et al., 2007), one based on averaging over indicator models (Stock and Watson, 2004), and a static factor model (Stock and Watson, 2002). -
Central Bank Crisis Interventions: A Review of the Recent Literature on Potential Costs
Central banks’ actions to stabilize financial markets and implement monetary policy during crises may come with costs and side effects. We provide a literature review of these costs and discuss measures that may mitigate the negative impacts of crisis actions. -
High-Frequency Trading and Institutional Trading Costs
Using data on Canadian bond futures, we examine how high-frequency traders (HFTs) interact with institutions building large positions. In contrast to recent findings, we find HFTs in the data act as small-sized liquidity suppliers, and we reject the hypothesis that they engage in back running, a predatory trading strategy. -
Limits to Arbitrage and Deviations from Covered Interest Rate Parity
We document an increase in deviations from short-term covered interest rate parity (CIP) in the first half of 2015. Since the Swiss National Bank’s (SNB) decision to abandon its minimum exchange rate policy, both the magnitude and volatility of deviations from CIP have increased across several currency pairs. The effect is particularly pronounced for pairs involving the Swiss franc. -
Earnings Dynamics and Intergenerational Transmission of Skill
How are your past, current and future earnings related to those of your parents? We explore this by using 37 years of Canadian tax data on two generations. -
Inflation, Output, and Welfare in the Laboratory
We investigate the effect of inflation on output and welfare in the laboratory. Consistent with monetary theory, we find that inflation acts as a tax on monetary exchange and reduces output and welfare.