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This paper proposes a unique approach to simulate intraday transactions in the Canadian retail payments batch system when such transactions are unobtainable. The simulation procedure has potential for helping with data-deficient problems where only high-level aggregate information is available.

Market power and pass-through of cost and demand shocks are studied in a market with free entry of heterogeneous firms and consumer mixed search. Equilibrium prices and markups are driven by variation in the elasticity of demand across firms. Improved conditions for buyers can either raise or lower market power.

Trading flows affect Government of Canada bond prices. Our estimates suggest a sale of 1% of the available supply of bonds typically lowers bond prices by 0.2%. From 2000 to 2025, demand from institutional investors, such as Canadian pension funds and foreign investors, explains 69% of quarterly price variation, with the remainder explained by changes in the supply of bonds.

I analyze the relationship between carrying a credit card balance and future financial stress. I find that carrying a balance significantly increases the likelihood that credit card holders miss future debt payments. This likelihood tends to rise as credit card balances grow and are held for long periods.

While Government of Canada bond transactions of hedge funds are typically in the opposite direction to those of other market participants, during the peak period of market turmoil in March 2020, hedge funds sold these bonds, just as other market participants did. This shows that hedge funds can at times contribute to one-sided markets and amplify declines in market liquidity.

We study a cross section of carry-trade-generated currency excess returns in terms of their exposure to global fundamental macroeconomic risk.

This note presents our estimates of potential output growth for the global economy through 2020. Overall, we expect global potential output growth to remain broadly stable over the projection horizon, averaging 3.3 per cent, although there is considerable uncertainty surrounding these estimates.

Portfolio-balance models of the yield curve are notoriously hard to estimate. This paper offers a simple, two-step estimation approach that can be implemented with standard term structure estimation methods. In our application to U.S. Treasury data, our method recovers economically interpretable drivers of the yield curve.

We study economies where firms acquire capital in primary markets then retrade it in secondary markets after information on idiosyncratic productivity arrives. Our secondary markets incorporate bilateral trade with search, bargaining and liquidity frictions.

Chinese real export growth decelerated considerably during the last decade. This paper argues that the slowdown largely resulted from China moving to a more sophisticated mix of exports: China produced more sophisticated goods over which it had pricing power instead of producing greater volumes of less sophisticated products.