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The use of bank notes in Canada for payments has declined consistently for some time, and similar trends are evident in other countries. This has led some observers to predict a cashless society in the future.

The size of China’s financial system raises the possibility that the liberalization of its capital account could have a large effect on the global financial system. This paper provides a counterfactual scenario analysis that estimates what the size and direction of China’s overseas portfolio investments would have been in 2015 if China had had no restrictions on these outflows.

Because the Bank of Canada has started withdrawing monetary stimulus, monitoring the transmission of these changes to monetary policy will be important. Subcomponents of consumption and housing will likely respond differently to a monetary policy tightening, both in terms of the aggregate effect and timing.

This monthly newsletter features the latest research publications by Bank of Canada economists including external publications and working papers published on the Bank of Canada’s website.

We document a strong asymmetry in the evolution of federal funds rate expectations and map this observed asymmetry into measures of monetary policy uncertainty. We show that periods of monetary policy tightening and easing are distinctly related to downside (policy rate is higher than expected) and upside (policy rate is lower than expected) uncertainty.

Since 2010, the liquidity of corporate bonds has improved on average, while their trading activity has remained stable. We find that the liquidity and trading activity of riskier bonds or bonds issued by firms in different sectors have been stable. However, the liquidity and trading activity of bonds issued by banks have improved. We observe short-lived episodes of deterioration in liquidity and trading activity.

This paper studies the effects of financial development, taking into account both formal and informal financing. Using cross-country firm-level data, we document that informal financing is utilized more by rich countries than poor countries.

This discussion paper is the third in the Financial Markets Department’s series on the structure of Canadian financial markets. These papers are called “ecologies” because they study the interactions among market participants, infrastructures, regulations and the terms of the traded contract itself.

In recent years, the liquidity in the secondary market for Canadian provincial bonds was a concern for many market participants. We find that a proxy for the bid-ask spread has deteriorated modestly since 2010. However, a proxy for price impact as well as measures of trade size, the number of trades and turnover have been stable or improved since 2010. This holds for bonds issued by different provinces and for bonds of different ages and sizes. Alberta bonds provide an interesting case study: After the fall in oil prices in 2014–15, the province increased its borrowing in the bond market and its credit rating was downgraded. Yet trading activity for Alberta bonds increased significantly. Overall, we interpret the evidence as a sign of resilience in the provincial bond market.

We present a simple model to study the risk sensitivity of capital regulation. A banker funds investment with uninsured deposits and costly capital, where capital resolves a moral hazard problem in the banker’s choice of risk.