Browse research

I study the welfare consequences of regulations on high-cost consumer credit in the United States and find that borrowing limits have distributional impacts on households with self-control issues.

We model non-bank entry into fixed-income markets and state-dependent liquidity. Non-bank financial institutions improve liquidity more during normal times than in stress. Banks may become less reliable to marginal clients, exacerbating the difference in liquidity between normal and stressed times. Central bank lending during stress may limit this harmful division.

We find that foreign central banks own a large share of Government of Canada (GoC) bonds and tend to hold their positions for longer than other types of asset managers. This buy-and-hold behaviour could offer benefits. For example, foreign central banks may be less likely than other asset managers to sell bonds and add to strains on market liquidity in periods of turmoil. However, foreign central banks’ buy-and-hold behaviour combined with their minimal lending of GoC bonds in securities-financing markets, as observed in our available data, can potentially lower liquidity because fewer GoC bonds are available for others to transact in secondary markets. Indeed, we find that higher levels of foreign central banks’ GoC bond holdings are related to lower liquidity.

We study how the distribution of information supply by the news media affects the macroeconomy. We find that media coverage focuses particularly on the largest firms, and that firms’ equity financing and investment increase after media coverage. But these equity and investment responses are largest among small, rarely covered firms. Our quantitative studies highlight that the aggregate effects of media coverage depend crucially on how that coverage is allocated.

We study the distribution of political speech across U.S. firms. We develop a measure of political engagement based on firms’ communications (earning calls, regulatory filings, and social media) by training a large language model to identify statements that contain political opinions. Using these data, we document five facts about firms’ political engagement.

We investigate the welfare consequences of consumer credit regulation in a dynamic, heterogeneous-agent model with endogenous lender market power. Lenders post credit offers and borrowers—some informed and others uninformed—apply for credit. We calibrate the model to match characteristics of the unsecured consumer credit market and use the calibrated model to evaluate interest rate ceilings.

We study how price variation within a store changes with inflation, and whether households exploit these changes to reduce the burden of inflation. We find that price changes from discounts mitigated the inflation burden while cheapflation exacerbated it.

On May 27, 2024, the settlement period for trading GoC bonds in the secondary market in Canada moved from two days to one. This shortened time for settling secondary cash bond trades caused CORRA volumes to rise significantly, and they have remained elevated since. This combined with the skew in demand for funding has pressured CORRA higher. We find no indications that any other factors are contributing to the most recent pressures on CORRA.

This paper introduces and estimates a structural model of the Canadian primary market for government debt. We assess the role of dealer exit in this market as a key reason for increased, yet irregular, customer entry and quantify the benefits of greater customer competition against the costs of higher market volatility.

We find that on any given day, nearly half of Government of Canada bond transactions by clients of dealers can be offset with other clients, including during the turmoil in March 2020. Our results show that under certain conditions clients could potentially trade directly with each other and are a step towards understanding the relevance of broader all-to-all trading in the Government of Canada bond market.