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2126 Results

June 16, 2006

Global Imbalances—Just How Dangerous?

The combination of rising current account surpluses in Asia and a growing current account deficit in the United States has raised concerns that the resulting imbalances pose a threat to the world economy, especially if they are reversed in a disorderly manner. Some experts believe that normal market forces will resolve these imbalances over time; others argue that policy-makers should facilitate the adjustment with policies that curb domestic demand in deficit countries and stimulate it in surplus countries. Little and Lafrance provide a guide to the major issues and controversies involved in the debate.

Household Heterogeneity and the Performance of Monetary Policy Frameworks

Staff working paper 2022-12 Edouard Djeutem, Mario He, Abeer Reza, Yang Zhang
Consumption inequality and a low interest rate environment are two important trends in today’s economy. But the implications they may have—and how those implications interact—within different monetary policy frameworks are not well understood. We study the ranking of alternative frameworks that take these trends into account.

Time-Consistent Management of a Liquidity Trap with Government Debt

Staff working paper 2018-38 Dmitry Matveev
This paper studies optimal discretionary monetary and fiscal policy when the lower bound on nominal interest rates is occasionally binding in a model with nominal rigidities and long-term government debt. At the lower bound it is optimal for the government to temporarily reduce debt.
June 11, 2015

Assessing Vulnerabilities in the Canadian Financial System

The authors present the four common cyclical vulnerabilities that appear in financial systems, providing examples of qualitative and quantitative indicators used to monitor these vulnerabilities across different sectors. They also discuss other inputs to the vulnerability assessment and to the internal process used at the Bank of Canada for identifying, evaluating and communicating vulnerabilities and risks, and highlight some of the key challenges in assessing financial system vulnerabilities and risks.
Content Type(s): Publications, Financial System Review articles JEL Code(s): G, G0, G01, G1, G10, G2, G20

The Optimum Quantity of Central Bank Reserves

Staff working paper 2025-15 Jonathan Witmer
This paper analyzes the optimal quantity of central bank reserves in an economy where reserves and other financial assets provide liquidity benefits. Using a static model, I derive a constrained Friedman rule that characterizes the socially optimal level of reserves, demonstrating that this quantity is neither necessarily large nor small but depends on the marginal benefits of reserves relative to alternative safe assets.
November 17, 2011

Liquidity Provision and Collateral Haircuts in Payments Systems

Central banks play a pivotal role in well-functioning payments systems by providing liquidity via collateralized lending. This article discusses the role of collateral and haircut policy in central bank lending, as well as the distinguishing features of the central bank’s policy relative to private sector practices. It presents a model that explicitly incorporates the unique role of central banks in the payments system and argues that central banks must consider how their haircut policies affect the relative price and liquidity of assets, the market’s asset allocation, and the likelihood of participants to default. Furthermore, under extraordinary circumstances, there is a rationale for the central bank to temporarily reduce haircuts or broaden the list of eligible collateral to mitigate the shortage of liquidity in the market.

Volatility Risk and Economic Welfare

Staff working paper 2017-20 Shaofeng Xu
This paper examines the effects of time-varying volatility on welfare. I construct a tractable endogenous growth model with recursive preferences, stochastic volatility, and capital adjustment costs.

The Macroeconomic Implications of Coholding

Staff working paper 2024-16 Michael Boutros, Andrej Mijakovic
Coholder households simultaneously carry high-cost credit card debt and low-yield cash. We study the implications of this behavior for fiscal and monetary policy, finding that coholder households have smaller consumption responses in the short run but larger responses in the long run.

Measuring Limits of Arbitrage in Fixed-Income Markets

Staff working paper 2017-44 Jean-Sébastien Fontaine, Guillaume Nolin
We use relative value to measure limits to arbitrage in fixed-income markets. Relative value captures apparent deviations from no-arbitrage relationships. It is simple, intuitive and can be computed model-free for any bond.
August 23, 2003

Financial Developments in Canada: Past Trends and Future Challenges

Freedman and Engert focus on the changing pattern of lending and borrowing in Canada in the past thirty to forty years, including the types of financial instruments used and the relative roles of financial institutions and financial markets. They examine how borrowing mechanisms have changed over time and consider the challenges facing the Canadian financial sector, including whether our financial markets are in danger of disappearing because of the size and pre-eminence of U.S. financial markets. Some of the trends examined here include syndicated lending, securitization, and credit derivatives, a form of financial engineering that has become increasingly important in the last few years. They also study bond and equity markets to determine whether Canadian capital markets have been hollowed out or abandoned by Canadian firms and conclude that the data do not provide much support for that view.
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