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Aggregate consumption impacts of heightened job risks during recessions can arise either from ex-ante responses to the fear of unemployment or from ex-post consumption declines due to realized income losses. We use survey-based perceptions of job risk and actual labor market transitions to quantify the relative contributions of these two channels. We further show that belief stickiness limits the extent of ex-ante insurance against job risks.

We study the causal effect of mortgage rate changes on consumer spending, debt repayment and defaults during an expansionary and a contractionary monetary policy episode in Canada. We find asymmetric responses of consumer durable spending, deleveraging and defaults. These findings help us to understand household sector response to interest rate changes.

The recent financial crisis has led to the development of new regulations to control risk in designated payment systems, and the implementation of new credit risk management standards is one of the key issues. In this paper, we study various credit risk management schemes for the Canadian retail payment system (ACSS) that are designed to cover the exposure of a defaulting member.

Mutual funds employ a host of tools to manage redemption run risk. However, our results suggest that Canadian corporate bond funds may be vulnerable to redemption runs, especially when they are less liquid and when market volatility is high.

A regulator would want to restrict dividends to force banks to rebuild capital during a crisis. But such a policy is not time-consistent. A time-consistent policy would let banks gradually rebuild capital and pay dividends even when their equity remains below pre-crisis levels.

We evaluate, both empirically and theoretically, the spillover effects that debt-financed fiscal policy interventions of the United States have on other economies. We consider a two-country model with international portfolio rebalancing effects. We show that US fiscal expansions would increase global long-term rates and hinder economic activity in the rest of the world.

Given the influence that agents’ expectations have on key macroeconomic variables, it is surprising that very few papers have tried to extrapolate agents’ “true” expectations directly from the data. This paper presents one such approach, starting with the hypothesis that there is sluggishness in inflation and real GDP growth forecasts.

This article examines recent research on the influence of various forms of economic uncertainty on the performance of different classes of monetary policy rules: from simple rules to fully optimal monetary policy under commitment. The authors explain why uncertainty matters in the design of monetary policy rules and provide quantitative examples from the recent literature. They also present results for several policy rules in ToTEM, the Bank of Canada's main model for projection and analysis, including rules that respond to price level, rather than to inflation.

Our study aims to gain insight on financial stability and climate transition risk. We develop a methodological framework that captures the direct effects of a stressful climate transition shock as well as the indirect—or systemic—implications of these direct effects. We apply this framework using data from the Canadian financial system.

Cash gives users a high level of privacy when making payments, but the use of cash to make payments is declining. People increasingly use debit cards, credit cards or other methods to pay.