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Non-bank financing provides an important funding source for the economy and is a valuable alternative to traditional banking. It helps enhance the efficiency and resiliency of the financial system while giving customers more choices for their financial services. Unlike banking, it is not prudentially regulated.

We measure the contribution to inflation from the growth in markups of Canadian firms. The dynamics of inflation and markups suggest that changes in markups could account for less than one-tenth of inflation in 2021. Further, they suggest that peak inflation was driven primarily by changes in the costs of firms.

It is commonly believed that the response of the price of corn ethanol (and hence of the price of corn) to shifts in biofuel policies operates in part through market expectations and shifts in storage demand, yet to date it has proved difficult to measure these expectations and to empirically evaluate this view.

This paper studies the rapid increase since 2019 of Government of Canada (GoC) debt issuance alongside greater hedge fund participation at GoC bond auctions. We find a systematic relationship between GoC debt stock and hedge fund bidding shares at auction.

Over the past 20 years, there has been a major shift away from the use of paper-based retail payment instruments, such as cash and cheques, toward electronic means of payment, such as debit cards and credit cards. Recent Bank of Canada research on consumers’ choice of payment instruments indicates that cash is frequently used for transactions with low values because of its speed, ease of use and wide acceptance, while debit and credit cards are more commonly used for transactions with higher values because of perceived attributes such as safety and record keeping. While innovations in retail payments currently being introduced into the Canadian marketplace could lead to a further reduction in the use of cash over the longer term, the implications for the use of cash of some of the structural and regulatory developments under way are less clear.

How do banks' interconnections in the euro area contribute to the vulnerability of the banking system? We study both the direct interconnections (banks lend to each other) and the indirect interconnections (banks are exposed to similar sectors of the economy). These complex linkages make the banking system more vulnerable to contagion risks.

Average hourly real wage series from the Labor Productivity and Costs (LPC) program and the Current Employment Statistics (CES) program have evolved very differently over the past decades.

At this 2006 workshop hosted by the Bank of Canada, an international group of market participants, regulators, and policy-makers gathered to assess recent developments in the derivatives market. Among the topics discussed were the recent prodigious growth in risk-transfer instruments, including credit derivatives and inflation-linked derivatives, as well as the accompanying challenges and benefits. Overall, the development of derivatives markets was seen as providing broad economic benefits, including more complete financial markets, improved market liquidity, and increased capacity of the financial system to effectively price and bear risk. Yet concern was also voiced that market participants do not fully understand the risks that arise in trading credit derivatives.

We present a dynamic debt strategy model framework designed to assist sovereign debt portfolio managers in choosing an optimal debt issuance strategy. The main innovation of this framework is the introduction of dynamic issuance strategies, which allow issuance decisions to vary over time based on the model’s simulated state variables.

This paper studies the music streaming industry and argues that having exclusive rights granted by copyright law drives firms to offer exclusive content to lock in customers. I employ theoretical and descriptive empirical analysis, along with a dynamic structural model, to support the argument and explore policies for improving competition.