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The swap market has enjoyed tremendous growth in the last decade. With government issues shrinking in supply and increased price volatilities, the swap term structure has emerged as an alternative pricing, benchmark, and hedging mechanism to the government term structure.

I study how banking market concentration and reliance on wholesale funding affect monetary policy transmission to mortgage rates. I find that this transmission is imperfect and dampens the response of consumption, output, and housing prices.

The author proposes and evaluates econometric models that try to explain and forecast real quarterly housing expenditures in Canada. Structural and leading-indicator models of the Canadian housing sector are described.

Risk-management systems in financial institutions have come under increasing scrutiny in light of the current financial crisis, resulting in calls for improvements and an increased role for regulators. Yet such objectives miss the intricacy at the heart of the risk-management process. This article outlines the complexity inherent in any modern risk-management system, which arises because there are shortcuts in the theoretical models that risk managers need to be aware of, as well as the difficulties in sensible calibration of model parameters. The author suggests that prudential regulation of such systems should focus on failures within the financial firm and in the market interactions between firms and reviews possible strategies that can improve the performance of risk management and microprudential regulatory practice.

This paper studies exchange rate dynamics by incorporating bounded rationality, that is, limited foresight, in a small open-economy model. This behavior of limited foresight helps explain several observations and puzzles in the data of exchange rate movements.

An effective exchange rate is a measure of the value of a country's currency vis-à-vis the currencies of its most important trading partners. The Bank of Canada has created a new Canadian-dollar effective exchange rate index (CERI) to replace the C-6 index that it currently uses. The CERI uses multilateral trade weights published by the International Monetary Fund and includes the six currencies of countries or economic zones with the largest share of Canada's international trade. As such, it better reflects the recent changes in Canada's trade profile, including the rise in the importance of China and Mexico and the relative decline in importance of Europe and Japan in Canada's international trade. The author describes the methodology and construction of the new index and reviews the advantages it offers over the C-6, particularly the use of multilateral trade weights, the inclusion of trade in services, and the use of more recent trade data.

The authors consider the liquidity efficiency of Tranche 2 of the Large Value Transfer System (LVTS T2) by examining, through an empirical analysis, some plausible strategic reactions of individual participants to a systemwide shock to available liquidity in the system.

This paper reviews the range of extraordinary programs launched by the Bank of Canada in response to the pandemic-related financial market disruption. It provides some recommendations for future interventions to ensure the programs are appropriately structured for the financial and economic stresses they are intended to address.

Average hourly real wage series from the Labor Productivity and Costs (LPC) program and the Current Employment Statistics (CES) program have evolved very differently over the past decades.

We develop a production-network model to capture how decentralized finance (DeFi) has evolved across different sectors of financial services. The model allows us to measure the value added by different DeFi sectors and to study how the connections across the sectors influence token prices.