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In an investigation of banks’ loan pricing policies in the United States over the past two decades, this study finds supporting evidence for the bank risk-taking channel of monetary policy. We show that banks charge lower spreads when they lend to riskier borrowers relative to the spreads they charge on loans to safer borrowers in periods of low short-term rates compared to periods of high short-term rates.

The goal of this paper is to investigate what type of information from Bank of Canada communication statements or the market commentary based on these statements has a significant effect on the volatility or level of returns in a short-term interest rate market.

With increasing levels of household debt in recent years, the number of households that may be vulnerable to a negative economic shock is rising as well. Decisions made by both the debtor and the creditor can contribute to insolvency. This article presents some stylized facts about insolvency in Canada’s household sector and analyzes the role of creditors in insolvencies. The average debt of an individual filing for bankruptcy is more than 1.5 times that of an average Canadian household; bankruptcy filers tend to be unemployed or in low-wage jobs, and are typically renters. The article reports that banks that approve more loans per branch, which is interpreted as less-intensive use of soft information (such as the loan officer’s assessment of the applicant’s character), experience more client bankruptcies. This finding has important policy implications, because financial institutions that do not use soft information risk further deterioration in their lending portfolios.

We construct a multi-country affine term structure model that contains unspanned macroeconomic and foreign exchange risks. The canonical version of the model is derived and is shown to be easy to estimate.

This paper examines the impact of bank consolidation on mortgage rates in order to evaluate the extent to which mortgage markets are competitive. Mortgage markets are decentralized and so rates are determined through a search and negotiation process.

The authors describe the liabilities model of the Exchange Fund Account (EFA). The EFA is managed using an asset-liability matching framework that requires currency and duration matching of both sides of the balance sheet.

This paper assesses the merits of countercyclical bank balance sheet regulation for the stabilization of financial and economic cycles and examines its interaction with monetary policy.

A view advanced in the aftermath of the late-2000s financial crisis is that lower than optimal interest rates lead to excessive risk taking by financial intermediaries.

We study the trading dynamics in an asset market where the quality of assets is private information of the owner and finding a counterparty takes time. When trading of a financial asset ceases in equilibrium as a response to an adverse shock to asset quality, a large player can resurrect the market by buying up lemons which involves assuming financial losses.

This paper examines the effectiveness of international capital controls in India over time by analyzing daily return differentials in the non-deliverable forward (NDF) markets using the self-exciting threshold autoregressive (SETAR) methodology.