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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.

This report reviews the use of quantitative tools to gauge market participants’ assessment of banking system resilience. These measures complement traditional balance-sheet metrics and suggest that markets consider large Canadian banks to be better placed to weather adverse shocks than banks in other advanced economies. Compared with regulatory capital ratios, however, the measures suggest less improvement in banking system resilience since the pre-crisis period.

We study how different types of monetary policy shape the distributional effects of external economic shocks on households’ consumption in a small open economy. Our results present a trade-off between maintaining overall stabilization and controlling consumption inequality.

Monetary theory says that money is essential if it helps to achieve better incentive-feasible outcomes. We test this in the laboratory.

Would a shift in trading in fixed-income markets—from over the counter (bilateral trading) to a centralized electronic platform—improve welfare? We use trade-level data on the secondary market for Government of Canada debt to answer this question.

The Canadian Financial Monitor (CFM) survey uses non-probability sampling for data collection, so selection bias is likely. We outline methods for obtaining survey weights and discuss the conditions necessary for these weights to eliminate selection bias. We obtain calibration weights for the 2018 and 2019 online CFM samples.

How are regional cost shocks passed through into global prices? We investigate the role of short-run capacity constraints and show that they can induce stark non-linearities in the pass-through. We highlight this effect for the market for ammonia, a commodity produced largely from natural gas.

We introduce behavioral learning equilibria (BLE) into DSGE models with boundedly rational agents using simple but optimal first order autoregressive forecasting rules. The Smets-Wouters DSGE model with BLE is estimated and fits well with inflation survey expectations. As a policy application, we show that learning requires a lower degree of interest rate smoothing.

We estimate the effects of economic uncertainty on time use and discuss its macroeconomic implications. We develop a model to demonstrate that substitution between market and non-market work provides an additional insurance margin to households, weakening precautionary savings and labour supply and lowering aggregate demand, ultimately amplifying the contractionary effects of uncertainty.