Staff research

Foreign direct investment inflows are positively related to growth across developing countries—but so are savings in excess of investment. I develop an explanation for this well-established puzzle by focusing on the limited availability of consumer credit in developing countries together with general equilibrium effects.

How much discretion should local financial regulators in a banking union have in accommodating local credit demand? I analyze this question in an economy where local regulators privately observe expected output from high lending. They do not fully internalize default costs from high lending since deposit insurance cannot be priced fairly.

Digital currencies have attracted strong interest in recent years and have the potential to become widely adopted for use in making payments. Public authorities and central banks around the world are closely monitoring developments in digital currencies and studying their implications for the economy, the financial system and central banks.

In this analytical note we show that the share of the systematic variations in the Canadian dollar has risen significantly in the past two decades. Systematic variations in the exchange rate are shared with other currencies. This parallels the equity market, where variations in the price of a given stock are shared with variations in the prices of other stocks.

In order to understand what drives aggregate fluctuations, many macroeconomic models point to aggregate shocks and discount the contribution of firm-specific shocks. Recent research from other developed countries, however, has found that aggregate fluctuations are in part driven by idiosyncratic shocks to large firms.

The primary focus of this paper is to study conflict of interest in the brokerage market. Brokers face a conflict of interest when the commissions they receive from investors differ from the costs imposed by different trading venues.

Information technology (IT) is an increasingly integral part of everyday business and personal life reflecting the ongoing and accelerating digital transformation of the economy. In this paper, we present information gathered from a survey with export-oriented firms in the Canadian IT service industry and consultations with industry associations aimed at shedding light on this small but highly dynamic sector.

We analyze the impact of interest rate policy on financial stability in an environment where banks can experience runs on their short-term liabilities, forcing them to sell assets at fire-sale prices.

Using a novel data set for 17 countries dating from 1900 to 2013, we characterize business cycles in both small developed and developing countries in a model with financial frictions and a common shock structure. We estimate the model jointly for these 17 countries using Bayesian methods.

We develop a model in which a financial intermediary’s investment in risky assets—risk taking—is excessive due to limited liability and deposit insurance and characterize the policy tools that implement efficient risk taking.