Search

This paper provides an overview of digitalization and its economic implications. We assess the scope of digitalization in Canada as well as the challenges related to its measurement.

Cover page

French Provincial Issues in Canada

The coins pictured on the cover are part of the National Currency Collection, Bank of Canada.
Photography by Gord Carter, Ottawa.

We draw on the Canadian experience to examine how monetary and macroprudential policies interact and possibly complement each other in achieving their respective price and financial stability objectives.

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused an atypical recession in which some sectors of the economy boomed and others collapsed. This required a unique fiscal policy reaction to both support firms and stimulate activity in sectors with slack. Was fiscal policy able to get where it was needed? Mostly, yes.

I study the links between Canadian banks and non-bank financial intermediaries (NBFIs) by observing co-movements in stock prices. Perceived interconnections increased before the COVID-19 pandemic but have since stabilized, with the strongest ties seen between large banks and NBFIs. The secured credit line extended to Home Trust, a non-bank mortgage lender that experienced severe funding stress in 2017, significantly reduced banks' risk exposure to NBFIs during this episode.

We present a technical description of the Top-Down Solvency Assessment (TDSA) tool. As a solvency stress-testing tool, TDSA is used to assess the banking sector’s capital resilience to hypothetical future risk scenarios.

The Reports section of the Financial System Review examines selected issues of relevance to the Canadian and global financial systems. The June 2014 issue features three reports on financial system initiatives: making financial benchmarks more robust; implementing the stronger Basel III capital and liquidity framework for banks; and using stress tests to assess financial system risks.

Digital payments and decentralized systems enable the creation of new financial products and services for users. One core challenge in digital payments is the need to protect users from fraud and abuse while retaining privacy in individual transactions. We propose a pseudonymous credential scheme for use in payment systems to tackle this problem.

Trade liberalizations increase the sales and input purchases of productive firms relative to their less productive domestic competitors. This reallocation affects firms’ market power in their product and input markets. I quantify how the labour market power of employers affects the distribution and size of the gains from trade.

This article examines recent research on the influence of various forms of economic uncertainty on the performance of different classes of monetary policy rules: from simple rules to fully optimal monetary policy under commitment. The authors explain why uncertainty matters in the design of monetary policy rules and provide quantitative examples from the recent literature. They also present results for several policy rules in ToTEM, the Bank of Canada's main model for projection and analysis, including rules that respond to price level, rather than to inflation.