Staff discussion papers

The authors review recent developments in retail payments in Canada and elsewhere, with a focus on e-money products, and assess their potential public policy implications.

Canada has continued to lose market share in the United States since the Great Recession, beyond what our bilateral competitiveness measures (relative unit labour costs) would suggest.

The financial systems of some countries fared materially better than others during the global financial crisis of 2007-09.

The Latin American debt crises in the 1980s and the Asian crisis in the late 1990s both provided impetus for reforming the framework for restructuring sovereign debt. In the late 1980s, the Brady plan established the importance of substantive debt relief in addressing some crises.

Default rates are series commonly used in stress testing. In Canada, as in many other countries, there are no historical series available for sectoral default rates on bank loans to firms.

The Bank of Canada conducted a Wage Setting Survey with a sample of 200 private sector firms from mid-October 2007 to May 2008. Results indicate that wage adjustments for the Canadian non-union private workforce are overwhelmingly time dependent, with a fixed duration of one year, and are clustered in the first four months of the year, suggesting that wage stickiness may not be constant over the year.

Using a unique micro-dataset containing real and financial information on Canadian households for 2000–07, the authors address two questions: (1) What is the proportion of households whose consumption displays excess sensitivity to income, and who are likely liquidity constrained?

Since the autumn of 1997, the regional offices of the Bank of Canada have conducted quarterly consultations with businesses across Canada. These consultations, summarized in the Business Outlook Survey (BOS), are structured around a survey questionnaire that covers topics of importance to the Bank, notably business activity, pressures on production capacity, prices and inflation, and credit conditions.

The authors document leverage, capital and liquidity ratios of banks in Canada. These ratios are important indicators of different types of risk with respect to a bank’s balance‐sheet management. Particular attention is given to the observations by different types of banks, including small banks that historically received less attention.

The authors present the methodology and main findings of the Bank of Canada’s 2009 Methods-of-Payment survey, a detailed investigation of consumer payment behaviour in Canada. The survey targeted the 18- to 75-year-old Canadian resident population.