Search

This paper introduces and estimates a structural model of the Canadian primary market for government debt. We assess the role of dealer exit in this market as a key reason for increased, yet irregular, customer entry and quantify the benefits of greater customer competition against the costs of higher market volatility.

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.

Dynamic general-equilibrium models (DGEMs) are being increasingly used in macroeconomic research. In this article, the author describes the main features of these models and outlines their contribution to economic research performed at the Bank of Canada. He notes that the basic principle of DGEMs is that the modelling of economic activity, even on a scale as large as the economy of a country, should start with a series of microeconomic problems (at the scale of individuals), which, once resolved, are aggregated to represent the macroeconomic reality described by the model.

This article examines four indicators of balance-sheet risks—leverage, capital, asset liquidity and funding—among different types of financial institutions in Canada over the past three decades. It also discusses relevant developments in the banking sector that could have contributed to the observed dynamics. The authors find that the various risk indicators decreased during the period for most of the non-Big Six financial institutions, but remained relatively unchanged for the Big Six banks. In addition, the balance-sheet risk indicators became more heterogeneous across financial institutions. The observed overall decline and increased heterogeneity follow certain regulatory changes, such as the introduction of the liquidity guidelines on funding in 1995 and the implementation of bank-specific leverage requirements in 2000. Given that these regulations required more balance-sheet risk management, they have likely contributed to the increased resilience of the banking sector.

The Canadian overnight repo market persistently shows signs of latent funding pressure around month-end periods. Both the overnight repo rate and Bank of Canada liquidity provision tend to rise in these windows. This paper proposes three non-mutually exclusive hypotheses to explain this phenomenon.

This paper proposes a novel asymptotic least-squares estimator of multi-country Gaussian dynamic term structure models that is easy to compute and asymptotically efficient, even when the number of countries is relatively large—a situation in which other recently proposed approaches lose their tractability.

We examine different monetary policy governance structures and discuss the important roles of non-legislated processes and practices. We also provide an update on monetary policy governance at the Bank of Canada and how it has evolved over time.

The three articles in this issue provide an overview of the monetary policy decision-making process at the Bank of Canada, a discussion of Bank research on the assessment of vulnerabilities in the financial system and a description of recent fragmentation in Canadian equity markets.

We study the impact government expenditure has on inflation. We find that changes in government expenditure account for a substantial portion of inflation variations. We also find that inflation and inflation expectations respond negatively to fiscal spending shocks, reaffirming the supply-side channel through which inflation responds to fiscal expansions.

This article provides an overview of the growth of Canadian-dollar-denominated assets in official foreign reserves. Based on International Monetary Fund data and on internal Bank of Canada analysis, we estimate that the total reserve holdings of Canadian-dollar assets increased from negligible levels before 2008 to around US$200 billion in the third quarter of 2013. We discuss the determinants of this increase, as well as its potential impact on Canadian debt markets, for example, lower yields and therefore reduced financing costs for the Government of Canada, and the possible negative impact on market liquidity.