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The Bank of Canada is keenly interested in productivity - for a number of reasons. Productivity gains are a key determinant of growth in potential output and, hence, of Canada's sustainable pace of non-inflationary economic expansion.

This paper analyzes cross-border cryptocurrency flows, focusing on Bitcoin and four major stablecoins. Using data for 162 countries, we identify the key determinants, including responses to weak economic conditions and demand for remittances. A COVID-19 case study supports these findings and emphasizes the role of cryptocurrencies in global finance.

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 assess how location affects house prices in Canada. The gap in prices between suburbs and downtown was closing gradually before the pandemic. The gap has been closing faster since spring 2020. This finding reflects a shift in preferences toward more living space.

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.

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.

We perform an analysis to determine how well the introduction of a countercyclical loanto- value (LTV) ratio can reduce household indebtedness and housing price fluctuations compared with a monetary policy rule augmented with house price inflation.

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.