Staff working papers

Staff working papers provide a forum for staff to publish work-in-progress research intended for journal publication.

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1330 result(s)

We Didn’t Start the Fire: Effects of a Natural Disaster on Consumers’ Financial Distress

We use detailed consumer credit data to investigate the impact of the 2016 Fort McMurray wildfire, the costliest wildfire disaster in Canadian history, on consumers’ financial stress. We focus on the arrears of insured mortgages because of their important implications for financial institutions and insurers’ business risk and relevant management practices.

On the Fragility of DeFi Lending

Staff Working Paper 2023-14 Jonathan Chiu, Emre Ozdenoren, Kathy Yuan, Shengxing Zhang
We develop a dynamic model to capture key features of decentralized finance lending. We identify a price-liquidity feedback: the market outcome in any given period depends on agents' expectations about lending activities in future periods, with higher future price expectations leading to more lending and higher prices in that period.

Learning in a Complex World: Insights from an OLG Lab Experiment

Staff Working Paper 2023-13 Cars Hommes, Stefanie J. Huber, Daria Minina, Isabelle Salle
This paper brings novel insights into group coordination and price dynamics in complex environments. We implement a chaotic overlapping-generation model in the lab and find that group coordination is always on the steady state or on the two-cycle and that behavior is non-monotonic.
Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Topic(s): Business fluctuations and cycles, Economic models JEL Code(s): C, C6, C62, C68, C9, C91, C92, E, E1, E13, E7, E70, G, G1, G12, G4, G41

The Role of Intermediaries in Selection Markets: Evidence from Mortgage Lending

This paper looks at the role mortgage brokers play in helping borrowers generate quotes and qualify for credit. We find that, on average, borrowers that engage with a mortgage broker pay lower interest rates. However, in about 15% of cases, borrowers are steered towards longer amortizing mortgages than they would have chosen absent a broker. Since mortgages with longer amortization have higher total interest costs over the entire life of the mortgage, this steering is expensive.

Inflation, Output, and Welfare in the Laboratory

Staff Working Paper 2023-11 Janet Hua Jiang, Daniela Puzzello, Cathy Zhang
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.

Exporting and Investment Under Credit Constraints

Staff Working Paper 2023-10 Kim Huynh, Robert Petrunia, Joel Rodrigue, Walter Steingress
We examine the relationship between firms’ performance and credit constraints affecting export market entry. Using administrative Canadian firm-level data, our findings show that new exporters (a) increase their productivity, (b) raise their leverage ratio and (c) increase investment. We estimate that 48 percent of Canadian manufacturers face binding credit constraints when deciding whether to enter export markets.

Climate Variability and International Trade

Staff Working Paper 2023-8 Geoffrey R. Dunbar, Walter Steingress, Ben Tomlin
This paper quantifies the impact of hurricanes on seaborne international trade to the United States. Matching the timing of hurricane–trade route intersections with monthly U.S. port-level trade data, we isolate the unanticipated effects of a hurricane hitting a trade route using two separate identification schemes: an event study and a local projection.
Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Topic(s): Climate change, International topics JEL Code(s): C, C2, C22, C5, F, F1, F14, F18, Q, Q5, Q54

Stress Relief? Funding Structures and Resilience to the Covid Shock

Staff Working Paper 2023-7 Kristin Forbes, Christian Friedrich, Dennis Reinhardt
Funding structures affected the amount of financial stress different countries and sectors experienced during the spread of COVID-19 in early 2020. Policy responses targeting specific vulnerabilities were more effective at mitigating this stress than those supporting banks or the economy more broadly.

(Un)Conventional Monetary and Fiscal Policy

Staff Working Paper 2023-6 Jing Cynthia Wu, Yinxi Xie
We build a tractable New Keynesian model to study and compare four types of monetary and fiscal policy: policy rate adjustments, quantitative easing, lump-sum fiscal transfers and government spending. We find that tax-financed fiscal policy is more stimulative than debt-financed policy, and optimal policy coordination needs at least two of these four policy instruments.
Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Topic(s): Fiscal policy, Monetary policy JEL Code(s): E, E4, E6, E61, E62, E63
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