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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.

Foreign investment is often constrained by two forms of political risk: expropriation and corruption. We examine the role of government corruption in foreign direct investment (FDI) when contracts are not fully transparent and investors face the threat of expropriation.

We examine how intermediary capitalization affects asset prices in a framework that allows for intermediary market power. We introduce a model in which capital-constrained intermediaries buy or trade an asset in an imperfectly competitive market, and we show that weaker capital constraints lead to both higher prices and intermediary markups.

The present paper shows that, everything else equal, some transactions to transfer portfolio credit risk to third-party investors increase the insolvency risk of banks. This is particularly likely if a bank sells the senior tranche and retains a sufficiently large first-loss position.

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.

This paper studies the effects of financial development, taking into account both formal and informal financing. Using cross-country firm-level data, we document that informal financing is utilized more by rich countries than poor countries.

These forecasts are provided to Governing Council in preparation for monetary policy decisions. They are released once a year with a five-year lag.

A database of historical Government of Canada zero-coupon yield curves developed at the Bank of Canada is introduced in this article, which also includes an initial statistical analysis of the behaviour and evolution of the zero-coupon interest (spot) rates over the full period and two distinct subperiods. Specific areas of interest include the evolution of the levels of key interest rates and yield-curve measures over the sample as well as daily changes in the key interest rates and the yield-curve measures; the identification of a relatively small number of factors that drove the evolution of the yield curve; and the total returns that would have been realized by holding bonds of different maturities for a given holding period.

Central banks conduct research involving in-depth interviews with external parties—but little is known about how this information affects monetary policy. We address this gap by analyzing open-ended interviews with senior central bank economic and policy staff who work closely with policy decision-makers.

The Bank of Canada’s 2013 Methods-of-Payment Survey indicates that the share of cash in the overall number of retail transactions has continued to decrease, mainly because of increased use of contactless credit cards. The share of cash in the total value of retail transactions was virtually unchanged from 2009 to 2013. In particular, the value share of cash transactions above $50 increased. Automated banking machines (ABMs), still the major source of cash for Canadians, were used less often in 2013 than in 2009. Cash use in Canada is broadly similar to that in Australia and the United States.