Search

This paper studies the cost of limited commitment when a central bank has the discretion to adjust policy whenever the costs of honoring its past commitments become high. Specifically, we consider a central bank that seeks to implement optimal policy in a New Keynesian model by committing to a price-level target path.

Previous research suggests that lower-income Canadians may have unique experiences with the use of payments, including the use of cash and digital payments. We conduct a case study using data from [the Canadian Financial Diaries project/Canadian financial diaries] to gain insight into how some lower-income Canadians pay.

The cost of borrowing Government of Canada treasury bills (t-bills) in the repurchase (repo) market is mainly explained by the relationship between the parties involved. Some pairs of parties conduct most of their repos for t-bills rather than bonds, and at relatively high borrowing costs. We speculate that these pairs have formed a mutually beneficial service relationship in which one party consistently receives t-bills, while the other receives cash at a relatively cheap rate.

This note investigates the relationship between crude oil prices and investment in the energy sector. We employ a set of vector autoregression (VAR) models (unconstrained VAR, vector error-correction and Bayesian VAR) to formalize the relationship between the West Texas Intermediate (WTI) benchmark and fixed-asset cash spending in the oil and gas extraction and support activities sector of the Canadian economy.

Since last summer, many of us here today have been preoccupied with the ongoing dislocations in financial markets. What began in securities linked to U.S. subprime mortgages has spread to a broad range of structured assets, conventional credit markets, and, to a lesser extent, equities.

Schembri studies Canada's post-World War II experience in introducing a floating exchange rate, including its effects on the Canadian economy and its influence on the development of macroeconomic theory. In particular, Canada's flexible exchange rate and high degree of capital mobility with the United States provided an unprecedented experiment for macroeconomic policy. The successes and difficulties encountered by Canadian authorities in managing monetary and fiscal policy under this regime drew the interest of researchers at the International Monetary Fund and elsewhere and had a significant impact on the development of the Mundell-Fleming model, the path-breaking innovation in modern open-economy macroeconomics.

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.

John Maynard Keynes said the objective of "analysis is … to provide ourselves with an organized and orderly method of thinking out particular problems .… This is the nature of economic thinking."

How do banks' interconnections in the euro area contribute to the vulnerability of the banking system? We study both the direct interconnections (banks lend to each other) and the indirect interconnections (banks are exposed to similar sectors of the economy). These complex linkages make the banking system more vulnerable to contagion risks.

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.