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Product standards are omnipresent in industrialized societies. Though standardization can be beneficial for domestic producers, divergent product standards have been categorized as a major obstacle to international trade. This paper quantifies the effect of standard harmonization on trade flows and characterizes the extent to which it changes the cost and demand structure of exporting.

We examine the macro implications of commodity price shocks in a model with multiple production sectors that are interconnected within a commodity-exporting small open economy.

This paper studies how the impact of a cyber attack that paralyzes one or multiple banks' ability to send payments would transmit to other banks through the Canadian wholesale payment system. Based on historical payment data, we simulate a wide range of scenarios and evaluate the total payment disruption in the system.

The paper explores the link between financial distress and the commodity price hedging behaviour of Canadian oil firms.

Latency delays—known as “speed bumps”—are an intentional slowing of order flow by exchanges. Supporters contend that delays protect market makers from high-frequency arbitrage, while opponents warn that delays promote “quote fading” by market makers. We construct a model of informed trading in a fragmented market, where one market operates a conventional order book and the other imposes a latency delay on market orders.

Why do BigTech platforms introduce payment services? We explore this using a model in which a monopoly platform faces a trade-off between the costs associated with privacy concerns and the revenue from data services. We then analyze the feedback effects between data and payments.

We examine systemic risks within the Canadian banking sector, decomposing them into three contribution channels: contagion, common exposures, and idiosyncratic risk. Through a structural model, we dissect how interbank relationships and market conditions contribute to systemic risk, providing new insights for financial stability.

To what extent does a central bank digital currency (CBDC) compete with bank deposits? To answer this question, we develop and estimate a structural model where each household chooses which financial institution to deposit their digital money with.

Economists disagree about the factors driving the substantial increase in residual wage inequality in the United States over the past few decades. To identify changes in the returns to unobserved skills, we make a novel assumption about the dynamics of skills (especially among older workers) rather than about the stability of skill distributions across cohorts, as is standard.