E4 - Money and Interest Rates

• Do Low Interest Rates Sow the Seeds of Financial Crises?

  Staff Working Paper 2011-31 Simona Cociuba, Malik Shukayev, Alexander Ueberfeldt

  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.

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Research Topic(s): Financial system regulation and policies, Monetary policy transmission JEL Code(s): D, D5, D53, E, E4, E44, E5, E52, G, G2, G28

• Financial Frictions, Financial Shocks and Labour Market Fluctuations in Canada

  Staff Discussion Paper 2011-10 Yahong Zhang

  What are the effects of financial market imperfections on unemployment and vacancies in Canada? The author estimates the model of Zhang (2011) – a standard monetary dynamic stochastic general-equilibrium model augmented with explicit financial and labour market frictions – with Canadian data for the period 1984Q2–2010Q4, and uses it to examine the importance of financial shocks on labour market fluctuations in Canada.

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff discussion papers Research Topic(s): Economic models, Financial markets, Labour markets JEL Code(s): E, E3, E32, E4, E44, J, J6

• What Matters in Determining Capital Surcharges for Systemically Important Financial Institutions?

  Staff Discussion Paper 2011-9 Céline Gauthier, Toni Gravelle, Xuezhi Liu, Moez Souissi

  One way of internalizing the externalities that each individual bank imposes on the rest of the financial system is to impose capital surcharges on them in line with their systemic importance.

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff discussion papers Research Topic(s): Financial system regulation and policies JEL Code(s): C, C1, C15, C8, C81, E, E4, E44, G, G0, G01, G2, G21

• Innovation and Growth with Financial, and Other, Frictions

  Staff Working Paper 2011-25 Jonathan Chiu, Césaire Meh, Randall Wright

  The generation and implementation of ideas, or knowledge, is crucial for economic performance. We study this process in a model of endogenous growth with frictions.

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Research Topic(s): Economic models, Potential output, Productivity JEL Code(s): E, E4, G, G2, O, O3, O4

• How Do You Pay? The Role of Incentives at the Point-of-Sale

  Staff Working Paper 2011-23 Carlos Arango, Kim Huynh, Leonard Sabetti

  This paper uses discrete-choice models to quantify the role of consumer socioeconomic characteristics, payment instrument attributes, and transaction features on the probability of using cash, debit card, or credit card at the point-of-sale.

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Research Topic(s): Bank notes, Econometric and statistical methods, Financial services JEL Code(s): C, C3, C35, C8, C83, E, E4, E41

• Analyzing Default Risk and Liquidity Demand during a Financial Crisis: The Case of Canada

  Staff Working Paper 2011-17 Jason Allen, Ali Hortaçsu, Jakub Kastl

  This paper explores the reliability of using prices of credit default swap contracts (CDS) as indicators of default probabilities during the 2007/2008 financial crisis.

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Research Topic(s): Financial institutions, Financial markets, Payment clearing and settlement systems JEL Code(s): E, E4, E42, E5, E58, G, G0, G01, G2, G28

• Financial Factors and Labour Market Fluctuations

  Staff Working Paper 2011-12 Yahong Zhang

  What are the effects of financial market imperfections on unemployment and vacancies? Since standard DSGE models do not typically model unemployment, they abstract from this issue.

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Research Topic(s): Economic models, Financial markets, Labour markets JEL Code(s): E, E3, E32, E4, E44, J, J6

• Mixed Frequency Forecasts for Chinese GDP

  Staff Working Paper 2011-11 Philipp Maier

  We evaluate different approaches for using monthly indicators to predict Chinese GDP for the current and the next quarter (‘nowcasts’ and ‘forecasts’, respectively). We use three types of mixed-frequency models, one based on an economic activity indicator (Liu et al., 2007), one based on averaging over indicator models (Stock and Watson, 2004), and a static factor model (Stock and Watson, 2002).

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Research Topic(s): Econometric and statistical methods, International topics JEL Code(s): C, C5, C50, C53, E, E3, E37, E4, E47

• Money and Costly Credit

  Staff Working Paper 2011-7 Mei Dong

  I study an economy in which money and credit coexist as means of payment and the settlement of credit requires money. The model extends recent developments in microfounded monetary theory to address the choice of payment methods and the effects of inflation. Whether a buyer uses money or credit depends on the fixed cost of credit and the inflation rate.

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Research Topic(s): Credit and credit aggregates, Inflation: costs and benefits JEL Code(s): E, E4, E41, E5, E50

• Counterfeit Quality and Verification in a Monetary Exchange

  Staff Working Paper 2011-4 Ben Fung, Enchuan Shao

  Recent studies on counterfeiting in a monetary search framework show that counterfeiting does not occur in a monetary equilibrium. These findings are inconsistent with the observation that counterfeiting of bank notes has been a serious problem in some countries.

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Research Topic(s): Bank notes JEL Code(s): D, D8, D82, D83, E, E4, E42, E5, E50