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A view advanced in the aftermath of the late-2000s financial crisis is that lower than optimal interest rates lead to excessive risk taking by financial intermediaries.

Do short sales restrictions have an impact on security prices? We address this question in the context of a natural experiment surrounding the short sale ban of 2008 using a comprehensive sample of Canadian stocks cross-listed in the U.S.

Models with imperfect information that generate persistent monetary nonneutrality predominantly rely on assumptions leading to substantial heterogeneity of information across price-setters. This paper develops a quantitative general equilibrium model in which the degree of heterogeneity of information is determined endogenously.

Over the last few decades, real interest rates have trended downward. The most common explanation is that this reflects depressed demand due to demographic, technological and other real factors. We explore the claim that these trends may have been amplified by certain features of monetary policy.

We use vector autoregressions with drifting coefficients and stochastic volatility to investigate how the dynamic effects of oil supply shocks on the U.S. economy have changed over time. We find a substantial decline in the short-run price elasticity of oil demand since the mid-eighties.

We construct new indicators of demand and supply for the Canadian economy by using natural language processing techniques to analyze earnings calls of publicly listed firms. Our results indicate that the new indicators could help central banks identify inflationary pressures in real time.

Over the last few years, many countries have adopted inflation targets. The objective of this paper is to report some empirical results that bear on the link between the adoption of inflation targets and the behaviour of the main macroeconomic variables. After a discussion of some recent articles analyzing international experience, some simple statistical tests […]

The author examines the role of collateral in an environment where lenders and borrowers possess identical information and similar beliefs about its future value. Using option-pricing techniques, he shows that a secured loan contract is equivalent to a regular bond and an embedded option to the borrower to default.

Over the past 20 years, there has been a major shift away from the use of paper-based retail payment instruments, such as cash and cheques, toward electronic means of payment, such as debit cards and credit cards. Recent Bank of Canada research on consumers’ choice of payment instruments indicates that cash is frequently used for transactions with low values because of its speed, ease of use and wide acceptance, while debit and credit cards are more commonly used for transactions with higher values because of perceived attributes such as safety and record keeping. While innovations in retail payments currently being introduced into the Canadian marketplace could lead to a further reduction in the use of cash over the longer term, the implications for the use of cash of some of the structural and regulatory developments under way are less clear.

Advances in variance analysis permit the splitting of the total quadratic variation of a jump diffusion process into upside and downside components. Recent studies establish that this decomposition enhances volatility predictions, and highlight the upside/downside variance spread as a driver of the asymmetry in stock price distributions.