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2328 result(s)

Indebtedness and the Household Financial Health: An Examination of the Canadian Debt Service Ratio Distribution

Staff Working Paper 2008-46 Umar Faruqui
The household debt-to-disposable income ratio in Canada increased from 110 per cent in 1999 to 127 per cent in 2007. This increase has raised questions about the ability of households to service their increased debt if faced with a negative economic or socio-economic shock.

A Survey and Risk Analysis of Selected Non-Bank Retail Payments Systems

Staff Discussion Paper 2008-17 Nikil Chande
Payment services offered by non-banks have flourished in recent years. The author provides an overview of the different kinds of non-bank retail payments schemes currently available in Canada, illustrating each by focusing on a specific example.
November 11, 2008

The Role of Dealers in Providing Interday Liquidity in the Canadian-Dollar Market

Access to information about the future direction of the exchange rate can be extremely valuable in the foreign exchange market. Evidence presented in this article suggests that Canadian dealers are more likely to provide interday liquidity to foreign, rather than Canadian, financial customers, since foreign financial flows can be more informative about future movements in the exchange rate. The author reveals a statistical relationship between the supply of liquidity provided by non-financial firms and that provided by dealing institutions across time, and across markets, and suggests that the relationship between the positions of commercial clients and market-makers, and the role played by dealers in interday liquidity provision, has been understated in the market microstructure literature.
November 11, 2008

Merchants' Costs of Accepting Means of Payment: Is Cash the Least Costly?

In a competitive sales environment, merchants are compelled to offer consumers the option of paying for goods and services using a variety of payment methods, including cash, debit card, or credit card. Each method entails different costs and benefits to merchants. To better understand the costs of accepting retail payments, the Bank of Canada surveyed over 500 Canadian merchants and found that most consider cash the least costly. This article investigated this perception by calculating the variable costs per transaction of accepting different means of payment. The findings are that costs for each payment method vary by merchant and transaction value, with debit cards the least costly payment for a broad cross-section of merchants.
November 11, 2008

The Market Impact of Forward-Looking Policy Statements: Transparency vs. Predictability

Central banks continuously strive to improve how they communicate to financial markets and the public in order to increase transparency. For this reason, many central banks have begun to include guidance on the policy rate in the form of forward-looking statements in their communications. This article examines the debate over the usefulness of providing such statements from both theoretical and empirical standpoints. The evidence presented here suggests that the use of forward-looking statements in Bank of Canada communications has made the Bank more predictable, but not necessarily more transparent.
November 11, 2008

Conference Summary: International Experience with the Conduct of Monetary Policy under Inflation Targeting

Central bankers from inflation-targeting and non-inflation-targeting countries around the world and several distinguished scholars assembled at the Bank of Canada in July 2008 to review the international experience in some detail. This article highlights topics covered in the special lectures and sessions, including how inflation targeting can manage external shocks, various ways in which monetary policy decisions are taken, and the issues of transparency and communications. It also reports on the discussion in the closing panel, which considered options for the future of inflation targeting.

The Role of Foreign Exchange Dealers in Providing Overnight Liquidity

Staff Working Paper 2008-44 Chris D'Souza
This paper illustrates that dealers in foreign exchange markets not only provide intraday liquidity, they are key participants in the provision of overnight liquidity. Dealing institutions receive compensation for holding undesired inventory balances in part from the information they receive in customer trades.

Which Bank is the "Central" Bank? An Application of Markov Theory to the Canadian Large Value Transfer System

Staff Working Paper 2008-42 Morten Bech, James Chapman, Rodney J. Garratt
We use a method similar to Google's PageRank procedure to rank banks in the Canadian Large Value Transfer System (LVTS). Along the way we obtain estimates of the payment processing speeds for the individual banks.
Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Topic(s): Payment clearing and settlement systems JEL Code(s): C, C1, C11, E, E5, E50, G, G2, G20
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