Staff discussion papers

Over the past 10 years, financial firms have increased the size of their positions in the oil futures market. At the same time, oil prices have increased dramatically.

In emerging-market economies, real exchange rate adjustment is critical for maintaining a sustainable current account position and thereby for helping to reduce macroeconomic and financial instability.

Since the financial crisis, attention has focused on central counterparties (CCPs) as a solution to systemic risk for a variety of financial markets, ranging from repurchase agreements and options to swaps.

The Canadian Debt Strategy Model helps debt managers determine their optimal financing strategy. The model’s code and documentation are available to the public.

Measures of core inflation enable a central bank to distinguish price movements that are transitory and generated by non-monetary events from those that are more permanent and related to prior monetary policy decisions.

The authors investigate financial spillovers across countries with an emphasis on the effect of shocks to financial conditions in the United States on financial conditions and economic activity in Canada. These questions are addressed within a global vector autoregression model.

The authors use simulations within the BoC-GEM-FIN, the Bank of Canada's version of the Global Economy Model with financial frictions in both the demand and supply sides of the credit market, to investigate the macroeconomic implications of changing bank regulations on the Canadian economy.

To investigate the extent to which the transparency of the Bank of Canada's monetary policy has improved, the authors examine empirically – over the period 30 October 2000 to 31 May 2007 – the reaction of Canadian financial markets to official Bank communications, and in particular their reaction to the recent inclusion of forward-looking policy-rate guidance in these communications.

The Large Value Transfer System (LVTS) loss-sharing mechanism was designed to ensure that, in the event of a one-participant default, the collateral pledged by direct members of the system would be sufficient to cover the largest possible net debit position of a defaulting participant. However, the situation may not hold if the indirect effects of the defaults are taken into consideration, or if two participants default during the same payment cycle.

An objective function is a key component of a strategic portfolio management model used to determine the optimal allocations of assets and, possibly, their associated liabilities over some investment horizon.