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Implicit government guarantees of banking-sector liabilities reduce market discipline by private sector stakeholders and temper the risk sensitivity of funding costs. This potentially increases the likelihood of bailouts from taxpayers, especially in the absence of effective resolution frameworks.

Innovations in communications and information technology and the related globalization of financial markets have created the potential for important changes to the structure of Canadian equity markets. Established marketplaces can now compete more effectively on an inter-regional and international basis. At the same time, reduced costs have lowered the barriers to entry faced by new competitors known as alternative trading systems (ATSs). In response to this heightened competition, established Canadian stock exchanges have taken measures to improve market quality. While regulators see innovation as positive for the development of Canadian markets, there is some concern that market liquidity may be fragmented in the short run. The Canadian Securities Administrators have proposed a framework that attempts to address this issue and that would allow ATSs to compete with traditional exchanges for the first time. The authors provide an overview of the Canadian equity market and its structure, focusing on these recent developments.

There currently exists in the literature several continuous-time one-factor models for short-term interest rates. This paper considers a wide range of these models that are nested into one general model. These models are approximated using both a discrete-time model and a model that accounts for aggregation effects over time, and are estimated by both the […]

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Roman Antoninianus

The coins form part of the National Currency Collection of the Bank of Canada.
Photography by Gord Carter, Ottawa.

With the demise of monetary targeting over the past 20 years in many major countries, the question has arisen as to whether central banks should look at money at all when formulating and conducting monetary policy.

Senior Deputy Governor Carolyn Wilkins calls for the public and private sectors to work closely together to realize fintech’s full benefits and minimize its risks.

Using data on bank branch locations across Canada from 2008 to 2018, we explore an interesting aspect of bank branch competition—geographic concentration. We find that bank branch density does not correlate with geographic and market concentration; however, we do find strong correlation with postal-code demographics.

We explore how many electronic funds transfer (EFT) systems can viably coexist within a jurisdiction at efficient scale by estimating the cost curve of the average EFT. We estimate the marginal cost to be approximately $0.55 per transaction, and the fixed cost to be approximately $83 million per year.

Phillips curves are generally estimated under the assumption of linearity and parameter constancy. Linear models of inflation, however, have recently been criticized for their poor forecasting performance.

The author models the choice between credit cards and home equity lines of credit (HELOCs) within a framework where consumers hold lines of credit as instruments of consumption smoothing across state and time.