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We examine the role of debt in amplifying and propagating recessions. Firms’ debt adjustment makes recessions deeper but makes expansions gradual. In particular, when the aggregate business leverage is ten percentage points above average, the half-life of the recovery doubles.

After the financial crisis of 2007–09, many jurisdictions introduced new banking regulations to make banks more resilient and less likely to fail. These regulations included tighter limits for the quality and quantity of bank capital and introduced minimum standards for liquidity. But what was the impact of these changes?

This issue of the Financial System Review reflects the Bank’s judgment that high household indebtedness and housing market imbalances remain the most important vulnerabilities. While these vulnerabilities remain elevated, policy measures continue to improve the resilience of the financial system. A third vulnerability highlighted in the FSR concerns cyber threats to an interconnected financial system.

Our understanding of news shocks is, to a large extent, based on studies that focus empirically on short-run news. This paper brings new insights by analyzing the effects of giant commodity discoveries, which typically materialize over the longer run.

The literature highlights that labour market churn, including job-to-job transitions, is a key element of wage growth. Using microdata from the Labour Force Survey, we compute measures of labour market churn and compare these with pre-crisis averages to assess implications for wage growth.

Although the number of job applications has risen, job-finding rates remain relatively unchanged while job-separation rates have significantly declined. Rather than raising the probability of finding a job, we find that a rise in applications raises the probability of finding a good match, as evidenced by the decline in separation rates.

In this article, author Michel Rochette of the Bank's Risk-Management Unit briefly describes the initiatives undertaken to identify, analyze, model, and manage the principal risks inherent in the transactions of the Exchange Fund Account (EFA), where the international reserves of the federal government are held. The author focuses on five types of risk: credit risk, market risk, liquidity risk, operational risk, and legal risk. In addition, the author presents the risk-management principles underlying the activities of the EFA and the governance structure of the Account.

In the last half-year, the economic expansion in Canada has become well established, supported by low inflation, highly stimulative monetary conditions, and a strong U.S. economy.

I study the welfare consequences of regulations on high-cost consumer credit in the United States and find that borrowing limits have distributional impacts on households with self-control issues.

Governor Tiff Macklem talks about how important trade is for the economic recovery. He discusses what policymakers and business leaders can do to encourage growth in trade.