Research
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Financial Constraints and Investment: Assessing the Impact of a World Bank Loan Program on Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises in Sri Lanka
The authors examine the investment behaviour of a sample of small, credit-constrained firms in Sri Lanka. Using a unique panel-data set, they analyze and compare the activities of two groups of small firms distinguished by their different access to financing; one group consists of firms with heavily subsidized loans from the World Bank, and the other consists of firms without such subsidies. -
Excess Collateral in the LVTS: How Much is Too Much?
The authors build a theoretical model that generates demand for collateral by Large Value Transfer System (LVTS) participants under the assumption that they minimize the cost of holding and managing collateral for LVTS purposes. The model predicts that the optimal amount of collateral held by each LVTS participant depends on the opportunity cost of collateral, the transactions costs of acquiring assets used as collateral and transferring them in and out of the LVTS, and the distribution of an LVTS participant's payment flows in the LVTS. -
Real Exchange Rate Persistence in Dynamic General-Equilibrium Sticky-Price Models: An Analytical Characterization
This paper assesses analytically the ability of dynamic general-equilibrium sticky-price models to generate persistent real exchange rate fluctuations. It develops a tractable general-equilibrium model with Calvo-type price stickiness. -
Governance and Financial Fragility: Evidence from a Cross-Section of Countries
The author explores the role of governance mechanisms as a means of reducing financial fragility. First, he develops a simple theoretical general-equilibrium model in which instability arises due to an agency problem resulting from a conflict of interest between the borrower and lender. -
Do Peer Group Members Outperform Individual Borrowers? A Test of Peer Group Lending Using Canadian Micro-Credit Data
Microfinance institutions now serve over 10 million poor households in the developing and developed world, and much of their success has been attributed to their innovative use of peer group lending. There is very little empirical evidence, however, to suggest that group lending schemes offer a superior institutional design over lending programs that serve individual borrowers. -
The Canadian Phillips Curve and Regime Shifting
Phillips curves are generally estimated under the assumption of linearity and parameter constancy. Linear models of inflation, however, have recently been criticized for their poor forecasting performance. -
A Simple Test of Simple Rules: Can They Improve How Monetary Policy is Implemented with Inflation Targets?
The authors evaluate whether an assortment of simple rules could improve how the Bank of Canada implements its inflation-targeting monetary policy. They focus on measuring the correlation between the deviations of inflation from the target and the lagged deviations of rule recommendations from the actual policy interest rate. -
Are Wealth Effects Important for Canada?
The authors examine the link between consumption and disaggregate wealth in Canada. They use a vector-error-correction model in which permanent and transitory shocks are identified using the restrictions implied by cointegration proposed by King, Plosser, Stock, and Watson (1991) and Gonzalo and Granger (1995). -
Nominal Rigidities and Exchange Rate Pass-Through in a Structural Model of a Small Open Economy
The authors analyze exchange rate pass-through in an estimated structural model of a small open economy that incorporates three types of nominal rigidity (wages and the prices of domestically produced and imported goods) and eight different structural shocks. The model is estimated using quarterly data from Canada and the United States.