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Raising liquidity when funding is stressed creates pressure on the financial market. Liquidating large quantities of assets depresses their prices and may amplify funding shocks. How do banks weathering a funding crisis contribute to contagion risk?

Cyclical contractions are often referred to as inventory cycles, in part because movements in inventories can amplify cyclical fluctuations in output. An unanticipated slowing in demand generally leads to an unintended buildup of inventories: only with a lag do firms adjust production and their actual holding of inventories relative to the desired level.

This note examines the costs of the Government of Canada bond buyback and switch programs between 1998 and 2016. Our analysis indicates that the auction design of the buyback program was effective in retiring government debt with minimal costs resulting from bid shading in auctions and price impact.

This paper calculates an implied cost of equity for 19 developed countries from 1991 to 2006. During this period, there has been a decline in the cost of equity of about 10-15 bps per year, which can be partially attributed to declining government yields and declining inflation.

Data show that income inequality in Canada increased substantially during the 1980s and first half of the 1990s but has been relatively stable over the past 25 years. This increase was felt mainly by low-income earners and younger people, while older people benefited from higher retirement income.

We present a two-stage model of mobile phone and mobile payment usage that controls for selectivity. This reveals unobserved factors that work against having a mobile phone and toward mobile paying. Therefore, people who are unable to acquire or choose not to own a mobile device might have unmet payment needs.

This paper studies the steady-state costs of inflation in a general-equilibrium model with real per capita output growth and staggered nominal price and wage contracts.

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.

This paper examines the sale of durable goods by a monopolist in a stochastic partil equilibrium setting. It analyzes the responses of prices and output to various types of shocks and notes the differences with non-durable goods and competitive markets. It shows that behavior in this model with constant marginal costs of production is in […]

Central banks continuously strive to improve how they communicate to financial markets and the public in order to increase transparency. For this reason, many central banks have begun to include guidance on the policy rate in the form of forward-looking statements in their communications. This article examines the debate over the usefulness of providing such statements from both theoretical and empirical standpoints. The evidence presented here suggests that the use of forward-looking statements in Bank of Canada communications has made the Bank more predictable, but not necessarily more transparent.