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This paper presents four blue-sky ideas for lowering the cost of the Government of Canada’s debt without increasing the debt’s risk profile. We argue that each idea would improve the secondary-market liquidity of government debt, thereby increasing the demand for government bonds and thus lowering their cost at issuance.

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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.

We study how changes in prudential requirements affect cross-border lending of Canadian banks by utilizing an index that aggregates adjustments in key regulatory instruments across jurisdictions.

At the Pittsburgh Summit in 2009, G20 countries announced their commitment to clear all standardized over-the-counter (OTC) derivatives through central counterparties (CCPs). Since then, CCPs have become increasingly important and there has been an extensive program of regulatory enhancements to both them and OTC derivatives markets.

This paper compiles the contemporary view on three major Canadian-led trade policies that have marked Canada’s economic history since Confederation: the National Policy (1879), the Canada–US Agreement on Automotive Products (Auto Pact, 1965) and the Canada–US Free Trade Agreement (FTA, 1989, including its extension to the North American Free Trade Agreement, NAFTA, 1994).

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.

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.

We use graphic processing unit computing to compare Bayesian and sample theory semiparametric binary response models. Our findings show that optimal bandwidth does not outperform regular bandwidth in binary semiparametric models.

We study competition for consumer attention, in which platforms can sacrifice service quality for attention. A platform can choose the “addictiveness” of its service.

The degree to which financial constraint is binding is often not directly observable in commonly used business data sets (e.g., Compustat). In this paper, we measure and estimate the likelihood of a firm being constrained by external financing using a data set of small- and medium-sized Canadian firms.