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Developments are underway to replace Canada’s two core payment systems with three new systems. We use a discrete choice model to predict migration patterns of end-users and financial institutions for future systems and discuss their policy implications.

COVID-19 presents challenges for indebted households. We assess these by drawing parallels between pandemics and natural disasters. Taking into account the financial health of the household sector when the pandemic began, we run model simulations to illustrate how payment deferrals and the labour market recovery will affect mortgage defaults.

The Canadian financial system is vulnerable to cyber threats. But for many firms, cyber risk is difficult to quantify. We examine public information on past cyber incidents to better understand the current risk landscape and find that a holistic view is needed to fully grasp the nature of this risk.

We examine loan insurance—credit risk transfer upon origination—in a model in which lenders can screen, learn loan quality over time, and can sell loans. Some lenders with low screening ability insure, benefiting from higher market liquidity of insured loans while forgoing the option to exploit future information about loan quality.

Liquidity creation is a fundamental function of banks. It provides the public with easy access to funds. These funds are important because they allow households and businesses to consume and invest. In this note, we measure liquidity creation by Canadian financial institutions from the first quarter of 2012 to the second quarter of 2019, using a methodology suggested by Berger and Bouwman (2009) and known as the BB measure.

Deposit insurance protects depositors from failing banks, thus making insured deposits risk-free. When a deposit insurance limit is increased, some deposits that previously were uninsured become insured, thereby increasing the share of risk-free assets in households’ portfolios. This increase cannot simply be undone by households, because to invest in uninsured deposits, a household must first invest in insured deposits up to the limit. This basic insight is the starting point of the analysis in this paper.

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.

Using new regulatory data on residential secured lending from Canadian banks, we assess the growth rate of home equity lines of credit (HELOCs).

Can macroprudential foreign exchange (FX) regulations on banks reduce the financial and macroeconomic vulnerabilities created by borrowing in foreign currency? To evaluate the effectiveness and unintended consequences of macroprudential FX regulations, we develop a parsimonious model of bank and market lending in domestic and foreign currency and derive four predictions.

Recent policy changes are having a clear impact on the mortgage market. The number of new, highly indebted borrowers has fallen, and overall mortgage activity has slowed significantly.