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Current turbulence in Europe is a reminder that the crisis is not over, but has merely entered a new phase. In a world awash with debt, repairing the balance sheets of banks, households and countries will take years.

We investigate whether hedge funds contributed to Government of Canada bond market illiquidity at the onset of the Middle East war in early 2026. We find no evidence they did. Hedge funds remained active in primary auctions, while their secondary market trading remained broadly consistent with their usual relative-value strategies.

Product standards are omnipresent in industrialized societies. Though standardization can be beneficial for domestic producers, divergent product standards have been categorized as a major obstacle to international trade. This paper quantifies the effect of standard harmonization on trade flows and characterizes the extent to which it changes the cost and demand structure of exporting.

The Bank of Canada’s Merchant Acceptance Survey finds that 96% of small and medium-sized businesses in Canada accepted cash in 2023. Acceptance of debit and credit cards has increased to 89%, and acceptance of digital payments has also increased. However, Canada is far from being a cashless society.

We investigate the welfare consequences of consumer credit regulation in a dynamic, heterogeneous-agent model with endogenous lender market power. Lenders post credit offers and borrowers—some informed and others uninformed—apply for credit. We calibrate the model to match characteristics of the unsecured consumer credit market and use the calibrated model to evaluate interest rate ceilings.

Time-varying capital buffer requirements are a powerful tool that allow bank regulators to avoid severe financial stress without the cost of imposing very high levels of capital. However, this tool is only effective if banks understand how it is used. I present a model that banks and financial market participants can use to anticipate how time-varying capital buffer requirements change over time.

We study how the interaction of market power and nominal price rigidity influences inflation dynamics. We find that pass-through declines with price stickiness when markets are concentrated, which implies a lower slope of the New Keynesian Phillips curve.

We produce forecasts for four risk scenarios to consider their usefulness for monitoring the Canadian economy. We find a high-oil-price scenario benefits the economy, a US recession induces a slowdown, a tight labor market leads to price increases, and a restrictive monetary policy scenario increases the unemployment rate while lowering the inflation rate.

Natural disasters can create important challenges for monetary policy in resource-rich small open economies. Using a DSGE model calibrated to Canada, we show that most disasters operate as adverse supply shocks, lowering output and raising inflation, thereby creating a trade-off for monetary policy.

Recessions feature elevated uncertainty. We develop a nonlinear imperfect-information New Keynesian model where procyclical information quality generates endogenous countercyclical uncertainty and precautionary saving. This demand channel can overturn the inflationary impact of negative supply shocks, making them deflationary, unless monetary policy stabilizes the output gap.