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Deposit insurance protects depositors from failing banks, thus making insured deposits risk-free. When a deposit insurance limit is increased, some deposits that previously were uninsured become insured, thereby increasing the share of risk-free assets in households’ portfolios. This increase cannot simply be undone by households, because to invest in uninsured deposits, a household must first invest in insured deposits up to the limit. This basic insight is the starting point of the analysis in this paper.

The Canadian economy is expected to grow by 1.6 per cent in 2013, 2.3 per cent in 2014 and 2.6 per cent in 2015, and to reach full production capacity around the end of 2015.

This equilibrium model explains the trend in long-term yields and business-cycle movements in short-term yields and yield spreads. The less-frequent inverted yield curves (and less-frequent recessions) after the 1990s are due to recent secular stagnation and procyclical inflation expectations.

This article examines the changes that have occurred in the composition of funds raised by provincial borrowers during the 1990s. Higher financing requirements, coupled with the declining availability of funds from non-market sources such as the Canada Pension Plan, led provincial governments and their Crown corporations to broaden and to diversify their debt management programs. In particular, provincial borrowers expanded their presence in foreign bond markets, increased their issuance of floating-rate debt, and incorporated a wide variety of innovative debt instruments into their borrowing programs in order to minimize their borrowing costs and to manage the risks associated with the issuing of debt. As a result, the composition of funds raised by provincial borrowers during the 1990s differed markedly from that of the previous decade: between 1990 and 1995, provincial borrowing requirements were met almost entirely through the issuance of marketable debt, and net new foreign currency debt issues averaged nearly 50 per cent of funds raised, whereas between 1980 and 1989, non-market sources provided close to 30 per cent of funds raised, and net new foreign currency debt issues provided less than 20 per cent.

Of particular concern to monetary policy-makers is the considerable unreliability of financial variables for predicting GDP growth and inflation.

The author analyzes a general-equilibrium model of a heterogeneous agents economy in which the agents are subject to borrowing constraints and uninsurable idiosyncratic production risk.

This paper examines the role of the extensive and intensive margins of labour input in the context of a business cycle model with a financial friction. We document significant variation in the hours worked per worker for many emerging-market economies. Both employment and hours worked per worker are positively correlated with each other and with output.

Using stock market data on banks, we show that the book value of loans recognizes losses with a delay. This delayed accounting is important for regulation because the requirements regulators impose are based on book values.

We build a network formation game of firms with trade flows to study the adoption and usage of a new digital currency as an alternative to correspondent banking.

In our analysis of the US productivity slowdown in the 1970s and 2000s, we find that a significant portion of this deceleration can be attributed to a lack of improvement in allocative efficiency across sectors. Our analysis further identifies increased sector-level volatility as a major contributor to this lack of improvement in allocative efficiency.