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Stress testing, at its most general level, is an investigation of the performance of an entity under abnormal operating conditions.

In this paper we document Canada’s trade policy response to late-nineteenth- and earlytwentieth-century globalization. We link newly digitized annual product-specific data on the value of Canadian imports and duties paid from 1870–1913 to establishment-specific production and location information drawn from the manuscripts of the 1871 industrial census.

The authors describe the principal results obtained from a new method applied to the estimation of potential U.S. GDP.

We provide evidence regarding the dynamic behaviour of net labour flows across U.S. states in response to a positive technology shock. Technology shocks are identified as disturbances that increase relative state productivity in the long run for 226 state pairs, encompassing 80 per cent of labour flows across U.S. states in the 1976 - 2008 period.

The financial system makes an important contribution to the welfare of all Canadians. The ability of households and firms to confidently hold and transfer financial assets is one of the fundamental building blocks of the Canadian economy.

We study the cross-section of equilibrium returns on safe assets using a tractable asset pricing model with a micro-founded demand for liquidity and multiple safe assets with heterogeneous transaction costs. We test the main predictions of our theory using a novel measure of relative (in)convenience yields in the US Treasury market.

The Canadian Survey of Consumer Expectations (CSCE) collects respondents’ views on inflation, the labour market and household finances. The survey for the fourth quarter of 2020 was conducted from November 10 to December 1, 2020. This period coincides with a sharp increase in COVID‑19 cases across Canada and follows announcements about the development of effective vaccines. Since the survey was conducted, some provinces have imposed additional measures to contain the spread of the virus. In addition, the first vaccines have begun to be administered. Like the previous two surveys, the fourth-quarter survey included questions on the impacts of COVID‑19 and the measures to contain its spread. This survey also asked respondents how they used any benefits they received from income-support programs that governments put in place to help them through the pandemic. This quarter, the report provides some details by demographic characteristics.

Freedman and Engert focus on the changing pattern of lending and borrowing in Canada in the past thirty to forty years, including the types of financial instruments used and the relative roles of financial institutions and financial markets. They examine how borrowing mechanisms have changed over time and consider the challenges facing the Canadian financial sector, including whether our financial markets are in danger of disappearing because of the size and pre-eminence of U.S. financial markets. Some of the trends examined here include syndicated lending, securitization, and credit derivatives, a form of financial engineering that has become increasingly important in the last few years. They also study bond and equity markets to determine whether Canadian capital markets have been hollowed out or abandoned by Canadian firms and conclude that the data do not provide much support for that view.

The Federal Reserve’s path for withdrawal of monetary stimulus and eventually increasing interest rates could have substantial repercussions for capital flows to emerging-market economies (EMEs).