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The turmoil in global financial markets entered a new phase in September, moving to a more acute and broad-based loss of confidence in the context of a series of failures and near-failures of large financial institutions in the United States and Europe.

FSR Highlights - December 2008

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.

We model the asset-opacity choice of an intermediary subject to rollover risk in wholesale funding markets. Greater opacity means investors form more dispersed beliefs about an intermediary’s profitability.

It has been a difficult year for capital markets professionals. The turmoil has deteriorated into a full-blown financial crisis. Most financial markets have experienced historic falls in prices, and some are strained to the point of closing.

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.

Can daycare replace parents’ time spent with children? We explore this by using data on how parents spend time and money on children and how this spending is related to their child’s development.

The European Union, which currently consists of 15 states, occupies an important place among the advanced economies. The final stage of the European economic and monetary union (EMU) is scheduled to begin in January 1999 with the adoption of a common currency called the "euro." A decision on which countries will participate in the euro area in 1999 will be made next spring based in part on the achievement of the economic criteria laid out in the Maastricht Treaty. In this article, the authors, after a brief discussion of the historical background, cast some light on the institutional aspects of the EMU, on the formulation and implementation of economic policy, as well as on the internal and external effects of EMU completion. For Canada, the direct implications of the shift to the euro appear to be relatively modest, at least in the short run.

Using a novel data set for 17 countries dating from 1900 to 2013, we characterize business cycles in both small developed and developing countries in a model with financial frictions and a common shock structure. We estimate the model jointly for these 17 countries using Bayesian methods.

One year later, we review the events that took place in Canadian fixed-income markets at the beginning of the COVID-19 crisis and propose potential policy research questions for future work.

The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the need for policy-makers to closely monitor disruptions to the retail and food business sectors. We present a new method to measure business opening and closing rates using real-time data from Google Places, the dataset behind the Google Maps service.