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This article describes the Bank of Canada’s version of the Global Economy Model structured to incorporate an active banking system that features an interbank market and cross-border lending. After describing the new model, the authors use it to examine the responses of selected U.S. and Canadian macroeconomic variables to a “credit crunch” in the United States and also to study the impact of changes in the regulatory limits to bank leverage in Canada. They also discuss the relative merits of a monetary policy framework based on inflation targeting and one based on price-level targeting in the presence of shocks to the U.S. and Canadian banking sectors.

We study how the tightening of US immigration policy affects the Canadian economy and American workers. After the reduction in H-1B visa admissions in 2017, more immigrants came to Canada, and Canadian firms expanded their employment, sales and exports. The close trade link between the United States and Canada dampens the benefit American workers derive from this policy change.

This paper develops a general equilibrium model to assess central bank digital currency (CBDC) design in a monetary system where traditional banks and “crypto banks” (i.e., banks that issue stablecoins) coexist. We compare tokenized and non-tokenized CBDC, showing that their desirability depends on the reliability of private money provision, the availability of collateral assets and the features of the crypto sector.

In many countries, the cost of housing has greatly outpaced income growth, leading to a housing affordability crisis. Leveraging Canadian loan-level data and quasi-experimental variation in payment-to-income constraints, we document an increasing reliance of first-time homebuyers on financial help from their parents, through mortgage co-signing. We show that parental support can effectively relax borrowing constraints—potentially to riskier borrowers.

This note summarizes the Bank of Canada’s annual reassessment of potential output growth, conducted for the April 2017 Monetary Policy Report. Potential output growth is projected to increase from 1.3 per cent in 2017 to 1.6 per cent by 2020.

We study access to Canadian retail banking and cash services in rural, localized markets using the Bresnahan-Reiss entry threshold framework. We find that the first retail banking services branch entry requires about 500 residents in an average market, whereas the first cash services location requires about 80 residents.

This paper analyzes the optimal quantity of central bank reserves in an economy where reserves and other financial assets provide liquidity benefits. Using a static model, I derive a constrained Friedman rule that characterizes the socially optimal level of reserves, demonstrating that this quantity is neither necessarily large nor small but depends on the marginal benefits of reserves relative to alternative safe assets.

Motivated by the observation that survey expectations of stock returns are inconsistent with rational return expectations under real-world probabilities, we investigate whether alternative expectations hypotheses entertained in the literature on asset pricing are consistent with the survey evidence.

This paper shows that changes in market participants’ fear of rare events implied by crude oil options contribute to oil price volatility and oil return predictability. Using 25 years of historical data, we document economically large tail risk premia that vary substantially over time and significantly forecast crude oil futures and spot returns.

The events of the past few weeks in global financial markets have been dramatic. Money and credit markets seized up. There was a massive flight to the safety of the highest quality of government debt.