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We study consumer cash inventory behavior by developing a dynamic model of forward-looking consumers and estimating structural parameters of the model using detailed consumer survey data. Consumers facing holding and withdrawal costs solve a discrete-time continuous-control dynamic programming problem to optimally use cash at the point of sale.

This paper quantifies tail risks in the outlooks for Canadian inflation and real GDP growth by estimating their conditional distributions at a daily frequency. We show that the tail risk probabilities derived from the conditional distributions accurately reflect realized outcomes during the sample period from 2002 to 2022.

How much discretion should local financial regulators in a banking union have in accommodating local credit demand? I analyze this question in an economy where local regulators privately observe expected output from high lending. They do not fully internalize default costs from high lending since deposit insurance cannot be priced fairly.

Did supply disruptions and cost pressures play a role in rising inflation in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic? Using data collected from websites of large retailers in multiple sectors and countries, we show that shortages may indicate transitory inflationary pressures.

The dramatic growth in China's exports of consumer goods such as clothing, toys, and electronics, and imports of primary commodities such as oil and metals is having major effects on global supply and demand. In examining China's role in global relative price changes, Francis finds that downward pressure on the relative prices of consumer goods is likely to persist as China's large labour supply continues its migration into manufacturing. Likewise, China's size and growth will also remain key drivers of global commodities demand for some time. Despite these forces, inflation-targeting central banks have the tools to keep inflation close to target, thus offsetting any persistent upward or downward inflationary pressure.

We forecast recessions in Canada using an autoregressive (AR) probit model. The results highlight the short-term predictive power of the US economic activity and suggest that financial indicators are reliable predictors of Canadian recessions. In addition, the suggested model meaningfully improves the ability to forecast Canadian recessions, relative to a variety of probit models proposed in the Canadian literature.

This article reviews recent work that uses principal-component analysis to extract information common to indicators from the Bank of Canada’s Business Outlook Survey (BOS). The authors use correlation analysis and an out-of-sample forecasting exercise to assess and compare the information content of the principal component with that of responses to key individual survey questions on growth in real gross domestic product and in real business investment. Results suggest that summarizing the common movements among BOS indicators may provide useful information for forecasting near-term growth in business investment. For growth in real gross domestic product, however, the survey’s balance of opinion on future sales growth appears to be more informative.

This paper uses the framework of arbitrage-pricing theory to study the relationship between liquidity risk and sovereign bond risk premia. The London Stock Exchange in the late 19th century is an ideal laboratory in which to test the proposition that liquidity risk affects the price of sovereign debt.

Futures markets are a potentially valuable source of information about price expectations. Exploiting this information has proved difficult in practice, because time-varying risk premia often render the futures price a poor measure of the market expectation of the price of the underlying asset.

We analyze the impact of interest rate policy on financial stability in an environment where banks can experience runs on their short-term liabilities, forcing them to sell assets at fire-sale prices.