Chris D’Souza is an Assistant Director in the Canadian Economic Analysis (CEA) Department. In this capacity, he helps oversee several surveys of consumers and firms including the Business Outlook Survey, the Canadian Survey of Consumer Expectations, and the Business Leaders Pulse.
Chris joined the Bank as a Senior Economist in the Financial Markets Department before moving to the Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions (OSFI). During the global financial crisis, he was a member of the Research Task Force of the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision. Mr. D’Souza taught at the University of Toronto from 2014 to 2024. Chris holds a Ph.D. in Economics from Queen’s University.
This paper introduces the Business Leaders’ Pulse, a new online survey conducted each month. It is designed to provide timely and flexible input into the Bank of Canada’s monetary policy decision making by asking firms about their sales and employment growth expectations, the risks to their business outlook, and topical questions that address specific information needs of the Bank.
Firms with fewer than 100 workers employ about 65 percent of the total labour force in Canada. An online survey experiment was conducted with firms of this size in Canada in 2018–19. We compare the responses of small and micro firms to explore how their characteristics and economic outlooks relate to their size.
Central banks conduct research involving in-depth interviews with external parties—but little is known about how this information affects monetary policy. We address this gap by analyzing open-ended interviews with senior central bank economic and policy staff who work closely with policy decision-makers.
Business investment has been lower than expected in Canada and abroad since the financial crisis of 2007–09. This corporate investment gap is mirrored in firms’ other financing decisions, as they have increased cash holdings and dividend payments and decreased issuance of debt and equity.
This note summarizes the key findings from Bank of Canada staff analytical work examining the reasons for the recent weakness in Canadian non-energy exports. Canada steadily lost market share in US non-energy imports between 2002 and 2017, mostly reflecting continued and broad-based competitiveness losses.
Digital technologies—cloud computing, the Internet of Things, advanced robotics, big data analytics, artificial intelligence and machine learning, social media, 3D printing, augmented reality, virtual reality, e-money and distributed ledgers—are transforming the way busi-nesses operate. How does this transformation compare with past industrial revolutions? How are digital technologies changing production systems across industries? Agile firms that use knowledge intensively and have high levels of both organizational and human capital appear set to realize the greatest benefits from digitalization. Finally, what are the implications for productivity, labour markets, inflation and monetary policy as we transition to the digital economy?
This article examines the incentives for banks to hold various assets on their balance sheets for use as collateral when the opportunity cost of doing so can be high. Focusing on the five-year period (2002-07) that preceded the financial crisis, it examines the choices made by financial institutions among the assets that are pledged as collateral in Canada's Large Value Transfer System. This serves as a baseline for collateral-management practices during relatively normal times. The results of this study are important for policy-makers, especially the Bank of Canada, which is concerned both about the efficient functioning of fixed-income markets and about the credit risk it ultimately bears in insuring LVTS settlement. The results suggest that relative market liquidity and market-making capacity are important factors in the choice of securities pledged as collateral in the LVTS.
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.
The ongoing process of price discovery in foreign exchange markets provides valuable information to certain market participants. Recent empirical findings suggest that aggregate measures of order flow convey information about the fundamental value of the exchange rate. Using a market microstructure approach, D'Souza reports on a two-year study of completed transactions within the Canadian and Australian exchange rate markets to examine the relationship between exchange rate returns and trades initiated in different locations. Based on the information content of the trades, he finds that geographic location and hours of operation are two of the factors driving informed interdealer trading.
Technological progress and the liberalization of capital flows have both contributed to the considerable changes in global equity markets over the past few decades. Yet obstacles to international capital flows still exist, leading to segmentation of markets and creating incentives for corporate managers to adopt financial policies such as international cross-listing. In exploring the costs and benefits of cross-listing, Chouinard and D'Souza find that U.S. exchanges are attracting an increasing share of cross-listed firms. The empirical studies they review suggest that the cost of equity capital declines following a foreign listing as a result of lower transactions costs or an improvement in the quality and quantity of firm-specific information available to investors. As well, informational asymmetries across countries prevent simultaneous price discovery across exchanges.
