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Recent years have witnessed the advances of e-money systems such as Bitcoin, PayPal and various forms of stored-value cards. This paper adopts a mechanism design approach to identify some essential features of different payment systems that implement and improve the constrained optimal resource allocation.

We analyze data from 2005 through 2009 that uniquely identify categories of traders to assess how speculators such as hedge funds and swap dealers relate to volatility and price changes. Examining various subperiods where price trends are strong, we find little evidence that speculators destabilize financial markets.

This paper discusses reputational risk in the context of central banking and explains why it matters to central banks. It begins with a general discussion of reputational risk within the broader framework of risk management.

Forward guidance is one of the policy tools that a central bank can implement if it seeks to provide additional monetary stimulus when it is operating at the effective lower bound (ELB) on interest rates. It became more widely used during and after the global financial crisis.

This paper summarizes the international evidence on the performance of quantitative easing (QE) as a monetary policy tool when conventional policy rates are constrained by the effective lower bound (ELB). A large body of evidence suggests that expanding the central bank’s balance sheet through large-scale asset purchases can provide effective stimulus under the ELB.

Foreign investment flows into Government of Canada (GoC) bonds have surged since the financial crisis. Our empirical analysis suggests that foreign flows of $150 billion lowered the 10-year GoC bond yield by 100 basis points between 2009 and 2012.

Central banks may face challenges in achieving their price stability goals when financial stability risks are present. There is, however, considerable heterogeneity among central banks with respect to how they manage these potential trade-offs.

There is widespread agreement that, in the United States, higher house prices raise consumption via collateral or possibly wealth effects. The presence of similar channels in Canada would have important implications for monetary policy transmission.

A key issue in the renewal of the inflation-control agreement is the question of the appropriate level of the inflation target. Many observers have raised concerns that with the reduction in the neutral rate, and the experience of the recent financial crisis, the effective lower bound (ELB) is more likely to be binding in the future if inflation targets remain at 2 per cent.

Under very general conditions, the total quadratic variation of a jump-diffusion process can be decomposed into diffusive volatility and squared jump variation. We use this result to develop a new option valuation model in which the underlying asset price exhibits volatility and jump intensity dynamics.