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We examine the potential impacts of a severe economic shock on the resilience of major banks in Canada. We find these banks would suffer significant financial losses but nevertheless remain resilient. This underscores the role well-capitalized banks and sound underwriting practices play in supporting economic activity in a downturn.

We provide empirical evidence of effects to the aggregate economy from surprises about financial intermediaries’ net worth based on a high-frequency identification strategy. We estimate that news of a 1% decline in intermediaries’ net worth leads to a 0.2%–0.4% decrease in the market value of nonfinancial firms.

This paper studies how the impact of a cyber attack that paralyzes one or multiple banks' ability to send payments would transmit to other banks through the Canadian wholesale payment system. Based on historical payment data, we simulate a wide range of scenarios and evaluate the total payment disruption in the system.

Could Canadian banks continue to meet their regulatory liquidity requirements after the introduction of a cash-like retail central bank digital currency (CBDC)? We conduct a hypothetical exercise to estimate how a CBDC could affect bank liquidity by increasing the run-off rates of transactional retail deposits under four increasingly severe scenarios.

Bank regulation presumes risks spill over more easily from large banks to the banking system than vice versa. Interestingly, we observe this is not the case. We find that the capacity to transmit risk is larger in the system-to-bank direction, leading to an increased default risk.

We explore the idea that the financial sector can be a source of non-fundamental risk to the rest of the economy. We also consider whether policy can be used to reduce this risk—either by increasing the supply of publicly backed safe assets or by reducing the demand for safe assets.

Climate transition scenarios clarify climate-related risks to our economy and financial system. This paper summarizes key results of Canada-relevant scenarios developed in a pilot project on climate risk by the Bank of Canada and the Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions.

We introduce a novel approach to categorize mortgaged homebuyers into first-time homebuyers, repeat homebuyers and investors. We show how these groups contribute to activity in Canadian housing markets, and we analyze the differences in their demographic and financial characteristics.

This paper examines the implications of positive news about future asset values that turn out to be incorrect at a later date in an open economy model with banking. The model captures the patterns of bank credit and current account dynamics in Spain between 2000 and 2010. The model finds that the use of unconventional policies leads to a milder bust.

Canada is undertaking a major initiative to modernize its payments ecosystem. The modernized ecosystem is expected to bring significant benefits to Canadian financial markets and the overall economy. We develop an empirical framework to quantify the economic benefits of modernizing the payment system in Canada.