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The authors examine the investment behaviour of a sample of small, credit-constrained firms in Sri Lanka. Using a unique panel-data set, they analyze and compare the activities of two groups of small firms distinguished by their different access to financing; one group consists of firms with heavily subsidized loans from the World Bank, and the other consists of firms without such subsidies.

In this article, author Michel Rochette of the Bank's Risk-Management Unit briefly describes the initiatives undertaken to identify, analyze, model, and manage the principal risks inherent in the transactions of the Exchange Fund Account (EFA), where the international reserves of the federal government are held. The author focuses on five types of risk: credit risk, market risk, liquidity risk, operational risk, and legal risk. In addition, the author presents the risk-management principles underlying the activities of the EFA and the governance structure of the Account.

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Brass Cash Register, 1910

The register is part of the National Currency Collection, Bank of Canada.

Photographed by Gord Carter, Ottawa.

This paper assesses the usefulness of consumer confidence indexes in forecasting aggregate consumer spending in the United States.

The Canadian Survey of Consumer Expectations (CSCE) collects respondents’ views on inflation, the labour market and household finances. The survey for the third quarter of 2020 was conducted from August 17 to September 1, 2020. Reported COVID‑19 cases have risen in some provinces since the survey was conducted. The survey included questions, introduced in the previous quarter, on the impacts of COVID‑19 and the measures to contain its spread, along with new questions on how the pandemic is affecting households’ savings.

Can regulators keep pace with banks’ creative regulatory workarounds? Our analysis unpacks the trade-offs between fixed regulations and crisis-triggered rules, showing that the latter are especially prone to circumvention—and can trigger larger, costlier bailouts.

This paper examines the experience of Sweden with government notes and private bank notes to determine how well the Swedish experience corresponds to that of Canada and the United States. Sweden is important to study because it has had government notes in circulation for more than 350 years, and it had government notes before private bank notes.

The premise that exchange rate pass-through has declined is critically reassessed; intensity in the negative feedback process between financial sector developments and the real economy during the recent global crisis is examined; update on past decade’s changing trends in debt issuance in Canada relative to those in other capital markets.

Pricing-to-market (PTM) theory suggests that monopolistic firms which export adjust their destination-specific markups in reaction to exchange rate shocks. These adjustments limit changes in the price of their exports.