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This issue of the Financial System Review reflects the Bank’s judgment that household indebtedness and housing market imbalances–the most important vulnerabilities for the Canadian financial system–have moved higher over the past six months. However, the financial system remains resilient, and macroeconomic conditions continue to improve. Other vulnerabilities discussed in this FSR are fragile fixed-income market liquidity and the capacity of an interconnected financial system to mitigate cyber threats.

With increasing levels of household debt in recent years, the number of households that may be vulnerable to a negative economic shock is rising as well. Decisions made by both the debtor and the creditor can contribute to insolvency. This article presents some stylized facts about insolvency in Canada’s household sector and analyzes the role of creditors in insolvencies. The average debt of an individual filing for bankruptcy is more than 1.5 times that of an average Canadian household; bankruptcy filers tend to be unemployed or in low-wage jobs, and are typically renters. The article reports that banks that approve more loans per branch, which is interpreted as less-intensive use of soft information (such as the loan officer’s assessment of the applicant’s character), experience more client bankruptcies. This finding has important policy implications, because financial institutions that do not use soft information risk further deterioration in their lending portfolios.

Recent studies in monetary theory show that if buyers can use lotteries to signal the quality of bank notes, counterfeiting does not occur in a pooling equilibrium. In this paper, I investigate the robustness of this non-existence result by considering an alternative trading mechanism.

This paper explores the impact of extreme weather exposures on the financial outcomes of low-income households. Our findings highlight the heightened financial vulnerability of low-income households to environmental shocks and underscore the need for targeted policies.

We revisit an old question: how do financial constraints affect the transmission of monetary policy to the real economy? To answer this question, we propose a simple empirical strategy that combines firm-level employment and balance sheet data, identified monetary policy shocks and survey data on financing activities.

We develop a model to analyze the link between financial leverage, worker pay structure and the risk of job termination. Contrary to the conventional view, we show that even in the absence of any agency problem among workers, variable pay can be optimal despite workers being risk averse and firms risk neutral.

We study competition for consumer attention, in which platforms can sacrifice service quality for attention. A platform can choose the “addictiveness” of its service.

This article explores the evolution of capital flows to emerging markets over the last 30 years with emphasis on the past decade. Capital markets in emerging-market economies have evolved substantially over the period, becoming increasingly deep and resilient. The author looks at how capital flows to these countries have changed in terms of magnitude, geographical distribution, the financial instruments used, and the country of origin. He also examines how changes in the investor base have affected these flows and reviews the factors underlying the growth of private capital flows in the 1990s.

As the sole issuer of bank notes, the Bank of Canada conducts methods-of-payment (MOP) surveys to obtain a detailed and representative snapshot of Canadian payment choices, with a focus on cash usage.

This paper compiles the contemporary view on three major Canadian-led trade policies that have marked Canada’s economic history since Confederation: the National Policy (1879), the Canada–US Agreement on Automotive Products (Auto Pact, 1965) and the Canada–US Free Trade Agreement (FTA, 1989, including its extension to the North American Free Trade Agreement, NAFTA, 1994).