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This note analyzes the evolution of the narrative in the Bank of Canada’s Monetary Policy Report (MPR). It presents descriptive statistics on the core text, including length, most frequently used words and readability level—the three Ls. Although each Governor of the Bank of Canada focuses on the macroeconomic events of the day and the mandate of inflation targeting, we observe that the language used in the MPR varies somewhat from one Governor’s tenure to the next.

With increasing levels of household debt in recent years, the number of households that may be vulnerable to a negative economic shock is rising as well. Decisions made by both the debtor and the creditor can contribute to insolvency. This article presents some stylized facts about insolvency in Canada’s household sector and analyzes the role of creditors in insolvencies. The average debt of an individual filing for bankruptcy is more than 1.5 times that of an average Canadian household; bankruptcy filers tend to be unemployed or in low-wage jobs, and are typically renters. The article reports that banks that approve more loans per branch, which is interpreted as less-intensive use of soft information (such as the loan officer’s assessment of the applicant’s character), experience more client bankruptcies. This finding has important policy implications, because financial institutions that do not use soft information risk further deterioration in their lending portfolios.

We study whether the credit derivatives of firms reflect the risk from climate transition. We find that climate transition risk has asymmetric and significant economic impacts on the credit risk of more vulnerable firms, and negligible effects on other firms.

In complex and interconnected banking systems, counterparty risk does not depend only on the risk of the immediate counterparty but also on the risk of others in the network of exposures.

We develop a model to analyze the link between financial leverage, worker pay structure and the risk of job termination. Contrary to the conventional view, we show that even in the absence of any agency problem among workers, variable pay can be optimal despite workers being risk averse and firms risk neutral.

Business cycles are substantially correlated across countries. Yet most existing models are not able to generate substantial transmission through international trade. We show that the nature of such transmission depends fundamentally on the features determining the responsiveness of labor supply and labor demand to international relative prices.

We present a model in which banks and other financial intermediaries face both occasionally binding borrowing constraints and costs of equity issuance. Near the steady state, these intermediaries can raise equity finance at no cost through retained earnings.

I show how to combine large numbers of forecasts using several approaches within the framework of a Bayesian predictive synthesis. I find techniques that choose and combine a handful of forecasts, known as global-local shrinkage priors, perform best.

Using highly disaggregated transaction-level trade data, we document the importance of new firm-level trade partner relationships and the addition of new products to existing relationships in driving aggregate trade flows.

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Siamese Gaming Tokens

The tokens pictured here are part of the National Currency Collection, Bank of Canada.
Photography by Gord Carter, Ottawa.