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How much of a CBDC would Canadian households want to hold, and what design features of a CBDC would they care about?

When financial system vulnerabilities are elevated, they can give rise to asymmetric risks to the economic outlook. To illustrate this, I consider the economic outlook presented in the Bank of Canada’s October 2017 Monetary Policy Report in the context of two key financial system vulnerabilities: high levels of household indebtedness and housing market imbalances.

The authors introduce new measures of important underlying macroeconomic phenomena that affect the financial side of the economy.

I propose a novel method to identify and estimate the macroeconomic effects of forward guidance and large-scale asset purchases (LSAP) for each FOMC announcement. I find that LSAP is more important than forward guidance in influencing output and inflation. LSAP puts upward pressure on short-term yields, so it should always be used in conjunction with forward guidance.

We document the outcome of an options decimalization pilot on Canada’s derivatives exchange. Decimalization improves measures of liquidity and price efficiency. The impact differs by the moneyness of an option and is greatest for out-of-the-money options.

Since 2014, the Bank of Canada (BoC) has maintained a comprehensive database of sovereign defaults to systematically measure and aggregate the nominal value of the different types of sovereign government debt in default. The database is posted on the BoC’s website and is updated annually in partnership with the Bank of England (BoE).

Understanding what causes the exchange rate to move has been on ongoing challenge for economists. Despite extensive research, traditional macro models of exchange rate determination—with the exception of the Bank of Canada's exchange rate equation—have typically not fared well, motivating economists to explore new ways to model exchange rate movements that incorporate more complex and realistic settings. Within the context of the sharp appreciation of the Canadian dollar in 2003 and 2004, Bailliu and King review the macroeconomic models of exchange rates, as well as the micro-structure studies that highlight the importance of trading mechanisms, information asymmetry, and investor heterogeneity for explaining short-term dynamics in exchange rates. In addition to summarizing the current state of knowledge, they highlight recent advances and identify promising alternative approaches.

This paper measures the welfare gains of switching from inflation-targeting to price-level targeting under imperfect credibility. Vestin (2006) shows that when the monetary authority cannot commit to future policy, price-level targeting yields higher welfare than inflation targeting.

This paper studies a dynamic version of the Holmstrom-Tirole model of intermediated finance. I show that competitive equilibria are not constrained efficient when the economy experiences a financial crisis. A pecuniary externality entails that banks’ desire to accumulate capital over time aggravates the scarcity of informed capital during the financial crisis.