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This paper studies, theoretically and empirically, the unintended consequences of mandatory retention rules in securitization. It proposes a novel model showing that while retention strengthens monitoring, it may also encourage banks to shift risk.

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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.

This paper proposes a practical approach to address the procyclicality of initial margin at central counterparties (CCPs) that can work even in periods of extreme stress. The approach allows CCPs to limit the speed of margin increases resulting from spikes in market volatility.

The financial system makes an important contribution to the welfare of all Canadians. The ability of households and firms to confidently hold and transfer financial assets is one of the fundamental building blocks of the Canadian economy.

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.

The Bank of Canada uses several short-term forecasting models for the monitoring of key foreign economies - the United States, the euro area, Japan and China. The design of the forecasting models used for each region is influenced by the level of detail required, as well as the timeliness and volatility of data. Forecasts from different models are typically combined to mitigate model uncertainty, and judgment is applied to the model forecasts to incorporate information that is not directly reflected in the most recent indicators.

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.

Conventional models imply that central banks aiming to raise inflation should lower nominal rates and thus stimulate aggregate demand. However, several economists have recently challenged this conventional wisdom in favour of an alternative “neo-Fisherian’’ view under which higher nominal rates might in fact lead to higher inflation.

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.

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.