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The countercyclical capital buffer is part of Basel III, the set of regulatory measures developed in response to the financial crisis of 2007–09. This study focuses on how time-varying capital buffers can address inefficiencies in economies with endogenous financial crises.

This report examines detailed data on home mortgages to provide a better understanding of the vulnerabilities associated with the mortgage market. The proportion of low-ratio mortgages is growing, particularly in regions with strong house price growth. Moreover, these borrowers exhibit less flexibility to adverse shocks, since they have high debt levels relative to income and have taken mortgages with long amortization periods.

We study economies where firms acquire capital in primary markets then retrade it in secondary markets after information on idiosyncratic productivity arrives. Our secondary markets incorporate bilateral trade with search, bargaining and liquidity frictions.

This paper examines the reliability of survey data on business incomes, valuations, and rates of return, which are key inputs for studies of wealth inequality and entrepreneurial choice.

Despite the efficiency gains that accompany automation, most large futures exchanges have been reluctant to move away from the traditional trading floor, citing early evidence that open outcry exchanges were more liquid than electronic exchanges. More recent studies, however, suggest that electronic trading is superior to open outcry in many respects, including liquidity. In this article, the author compares the two trading systems. Although many exchanges are shifting towards electronic trading, there are still several obstacles to this transition. But as technology rapidly reduces the cost of automation and increases the demand for global 24-hour trading, a worldwide transition to electronic order-matching will likely be the next important milestone for futures exchanges. Less-automated exchanges (including the Canadian futures exchanges) will undoubtedly continue to study and promote automation in order to keep pace with technological innovations.

We estimate the effect that owning Bitcoin has on the amount of cash held by Canadian consumers. Our results question the view that adopting certain new technologies, such as Bitcoin, leads to a decline in cash holdings.

We use Bayesian predictive decision synthesis to formalize monetary policy decision-making. We develop a case-study of monetary policy decision-making of an inflation-targeting central bank using multiple models in a manner that considers decision goals, expectations and outcomes.

The Canadian Financial Monitor (CFM) survey uses non-probability sampling for data collection, so selection bias is likely. We outline methods for obtaining survey weights and discuss the conditions necessary for these weights to eliminate selection bias. We obtain calibration weights for the 2018 and 2019 online CFM samples.

Systemically important payments systems are systems that, because of the size or the nature of the payments they process, could trigger or transmit serious shocks across domestic or international financial systems if they were insufficiently protected against risk. This article describes the overall framework of core principles developed for the design, operation, and oversight of such payments systems. The article reviews the role of the task force established to develop the core principles and examines the core principles themselves. It also examines the role of central banks in overseeing major payments systems and in applying the core principles to them. The focus is on the Bank of Canada's oversight responsibilities under the Payment Clearing and Settlement Act and on Canada's systemically important payments system—the LVTS.