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The literature on market timing of long-term debt issuance yields mixed evidence that managers can successfully time their debt-maturity issuance. The early results that are indicative of debt-maturity timing are not robust to accounting for structural breaks or to other measures of debt maturity from firm-level data that account for call and put provisions in […]

Information received since the last Monetary Policy Report, released on 17 November, points to a stronger pace of economic expansion in the United States and Europe than was expected at that time, and confirms the hesitant nature of the recovery in Japan.

The year 2006 marked a turning point for the Bank of Canada. We successfully completed our medium-term plan, The Way Forward, and began writing a fresh chapter in the Bank’s history based on a new three-year plan. In this annual report, we do more than give an accounting of past achievements. We also provide forward-looking information on the plans and priorities in our new medium-term plan. And as we advance, we are always mindful of the Bank’s original mandate, set out more than 70 years ago, to “promote the economic and financial welfare of Canada.”

We study the short-run effects of monetary policy using a search-theoretic monetary model in which agents are subject to idiosyncratic shocks and aggregate monetary shocks.

To track how firms were affected by the appreciation of the Canadian dollar in 2003 and 2004 and the steps they took in response, the Bank included supplementary questions in the quarterly Business Outlook Survey conducted by its regional offices. About half of the firms surveyed reported being adversely affected, one-quarter experienced a favourable impact, and the remainder reported no effect. Jean Mair classifies and summarizes the firms' responses, identifying the sectors that were most and least affected. Causes of the impacts are identified, as well as the actions firms took as a result of the appreciation. The article looks at these actions over time to see what they tell us about firms' adjustment process.

The Reports section of the Financial System Review examines selected issues of relevance to the Canadian and global financial systems. The December 2015 issue features two reports on significant developments in the financial system related to household finances: the importance of residential mortgage securitization for Canadian housing finance and the changing patterns of indebtedness of Canadian households.

In this paper, we empirically study how flagship entry in an online marketplace affects consumers, the platform, and various sellers on the platform. We find flagship entry may benefit consumers by expanding the choice set, by intensifying price competition within the entry brand, and by improving consumer perception for parts of the platform.

This note analyzes different economic models of a central bank digital currency (CBDC) ecosystem where the central bank chooses different levels of market involvement and usage of policy levers. The analysis suggests that there are trade-offs between the costs to the central bank and its ability to achieve policy goals like universal access.

Constrained efficient allocation (CE) is characterized in a model of adverse selection and directed search (Guerrieri, Shimer, and Wright (2010)). CE is defined to be the allocation that maximizes welfare, the ex-ante utility of all agents, subject to the frictions of the environment.

This issue of the Financial System Review focuses on the impact of COVID 19. The pandemic presents an unprecedented shock to the Canadian economy. This report identifies the effects on the Canadian financial system and explains how recent actions by the Bank and other policy-makers are helping to manage them. It further describes how a resilient financial system can help households and businesses smooth the effects of the COVID-19 shock and prepare for a robust recovery.