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The effects of global energy-price shocks on retail energy prices in Canada are examined. More specifically, the author looks at the response of the consumer price indexes for gasoline, heating oil, natural gas, and electricity in Canada to movements in world crude oil prices.

We analyze the relationship between the intensity of banks’ use of soft-information and household bankruptcy patterns. Using a unique data set on the universe of Canadian household bankruptcies, we document that bankruptcy rates are higher in markets where the collection of soft, or qualitative locally gathered information, is the weakest.

We examine nine changes in the New York State Security Transaction Taxes (STT) between 1932 and 1981. We find that imposing or increasing an STT results in wider bidask spreads, lower volume, and increased price impact of trades.

Over the past 15 years, long-term interest rates have declined to levels not seen since the 1970s. This paper explores possible shifts in global savings and investment that have led to this fall in the world real interest rate.

The authors examine the characteristics of International Monetary Fund (IMF) lending from the 1960s to 2005.

The recent financial crisis and subsequent recession have spurred great interest in the sources of unemployment fluctuations. Previous studies predominantly assume a single economy-wide labour market, and therefore abstract from differences across sectorspecific labour markets in the economy.

The intertemporal approach to the current account suggests modeling movements in the current account in a forward-looking, dynamic framework. In this framework, the current account reflects consumption smoothing of agents that lend and borrow from the rest of the world in the face of transitory shocks to income.

We examine the impact of the 2009 amendments to the Canadian Bankruptcy and Insolvency Act on insolvency decisions. Rule changes steered debtors out of division I proposals and into the more cost-effective division II proposals.

The consumption boom-bust cycle in the 2000s coincided with large fluctuations in the volume of home equity borrowing. Contrary to conventional wisdom, I show that homeowners largely borrowed for residential investment and not consumption.

Consumption inequality and a low interest rate environment are two important trends in today’s economy. But the implications they may have—and how those implications interact—within different monetary policy frameworks are not well understood. We study the ranking of alternative frameworks that take these trends into account.