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One of the main outcomes of the global financial crisis has been a series of new regulations imposed on the financial system and specifically on banks.

This is the first of the Financial Markets Department’s descriptions of Canadian financial industrial organization. The document discusses the organization of the repurchase-agreement (repo) market in Canada.

Merchants who accept credit cards face payment processing fees. In most countries, the no-surcharge rule prohibits them from using surcharges to pass these fees on to customers.

This article provides an analysis of some recent banking regulatory initiatives that are likely to influence the activities of financial intermediaries and the effectiveness of central bank monetary policy implementation frameworks. Although the effects of individual regulations can be anticipated in most cases, the combined regulatory impact is not yet clear. Central banks should, however, be able to accommodate the effects of the emerging regulatory environment within their existing policy implementation frameworks.

A key issue in the renewal of the inflation-control agreement is the question of the appropriate level of the inflation target. Many observers have raised concerns that with the reduction in the neutral rate, and the experience of the recent financial crisis, the effective lower bound (ELB) is more likely to be binding in the future if inflation targets remain at 2 per cent.

Recently released data show downward trends for both the firm entry rate and the rate of new entrepreneurship since the early 1980s in Canada. This paper documents these trends and discusses potential explanations.

This paper investigates the impact of market structure on the joint determination of exchange rate pass-through and currency of invoicing in international trade. A novel feature of the study is the focus on market share of firms on both sides of the market—that is, exporting firms and importing firms.

We develop an asymmetric, two-country equilibrium business cycle model to study the role of international trade in transmitting and propagating the real effects of global financial shocks. Our model predicts that a recession in a large economy considerably alters a recession in its smaller trade partner, with distinct investment dynamics driving the transmission.

The authors examine the liquidity and leverage characteristics of Canadian long-term, open-end mutual funds in terms of their potential systemic effects on the Canadian mutual fund sector and on the Canadian financial system more broadly. In their overall assessment of this sector, they consider the regulation, market size and ownership structure of mutual funds in Canada and provide observations about the industry globally.

Using the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, this paper studies household stock market participation and trading behavior in 2007–09, a period that saw a major stock market downswing. The stock market participation rate fell after the market crash.