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This article provides an analysis of some recent banking regulatory initiatives that are likely to influence the activities of financial intermediaries and the effectiveness of central bank monetary policy implementation frameworks. Although the effects of individual regulations can be anticipated in most cases, the combined regulatory impact is not yet clear. Central banks should, however, be able to accommodate the effects of the emerging regulatory environment within their existing policy implementation frameworks.

We provide empirical evidence of effects to the aggregate economy from surprises about financial intermediaries’ net worth based on a high-frequency identification strategy. We estimate that news of a 1% decline in intermediaries’ net worth leads to a 0.2%–0.4% decrease in the market value of nonfinancial firms.

How should a central bank conduct quantitative easing (QE) in a monetary union when regions differ in their size and portfolio characteristics? Optimal QE policy suggests allocating greater purchases from the region that faces stronger portfolio frictions, and not necessarily according to each region’s size.

We study the labour market and welfare effects of expanding unemployment insurance benefits and introducing payroll subsidies during the COVID-19 pandemic. We find that both policies are complementary and are beneficial to different types of workers. Payroll subsidies preserve the employment of workers in highly productive jobs, while unemployment insurance replaces lost income for workers who experience inevitable job loss.

Across several dimensions of lender of last resort policy, I highlight broad changes that have occurred since the 2008–09 global financial crisis and discuss some of the key challenges, choices and considerations facing the designers of central bank liquidity tools today.

In 1991, Canada became the second country to adopt an inflation target as a central pillar of its monetary policy framework. The regime has proven much more successful than initially expected, both in achieving price stability and in stabilizing the real economy against a wide range of shocks.

This paper combines loan-level administrative data with household-level survey data to analyze the impact of recent macroprudential policy changes in Canada using a microsimulation model of mortgage demand of first-time homebuyers.

When investors redeem their fund shares for cash, fixed-income fund managers can choose whether to draw on their liquid holdings or sell bonds in the secondary market. We analyze the liquidity-management decisions of Canadian corporate bond mutual funds, focusing on the strategies they use to meet investor redemptions.

In a simple two-sector New Keynesian model, sticky prices generate a counterfactual negative comovement between the output of durable and nondurable goods following a monetary policy shock. We show that heterogeneous factor markets allow any combination of strictly positive price stickiness to generate positive output comovement.