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Bank regulation presumes risks spill over more easily from large banks to the banking system than vice versa. Interestingly, we observe this is not the case. We find that the capacity to transmit risk is larger in the system-to-bank direction, leading to an increased default risk.

Emergency Lending Assistance (ELA) is a discretionary last-resort collateralized loan or ad-vance by the Bank of Canada to eligible financial institutions (FIs) and financial market infrastructures (FMIs) facing serious liquidity problems. In December 2015, the Bank revised its ELA policy to (i) replace the requirement for an FI’s solvency with the requirement for a credible recovery and resolution framework; (ii) include mortgages as eligible collateral; and (iii) clarify both the eligibility requirements for FMIs and provincially regulated deposit-taking FIs.

We build upon new developments in the international trade literature to construct a quantitative Ricardian framework similar to Caliendo and Parro (2015) to isolate and estimate the long-run economic impacts of tariff changes.

Our stress-testing tool considers banks under stress that can strategically manage their balance sheets. Using confidential Canadian supervisory data, we assess whether bank behaviour to maximize shareholder value can amplify a hypothetical stress scenario.

The Canadian financial system remains resilient, but vulnerabilities have become more complex and risks have grown. The Bank is carefully watching households’ high levels of mortgage debt, as well as the risks associated with a price correction in Canada’s housing market.

We study how the distribution of information supply by the news media affects the macroeconomy. We find that media coverage focuses particularly on the largest firms, and that firms’ equity financing and investment increase after media coverage. But these equity and investment responses are largest among small, rarely covered firms. Our quantitative studies highlight that the aggregate effects of media coverage depend crucially on how that coverage is allocated.

The proportion of assets held by the average Canadian firm in the form of cash has increased steadily since the early 1990s, and is now roughly twice as large as in 1990. The literature has established that the cash-holding behaviour of firms is highly correlated with financial constraints and firm characteristics.

Since the Bank of Canada adopted inflation targeting in 1991, it has focused on a measure of core inflation as a shorter-term guide for monetary policy. When the targets were renewed in 2001, the Bank adopted CPIX as its measure of core inflation because of the advantages it offered. Leflèche and Armour review the experience with CPIX and whether the criteria used to select it in 2001 still favour the measure today. They describe the various measures of core inflation monitored by the Bank and evaluate them on the basis of the volatility of the components, the volatility of the core measures themselves, absence of bias relative to total CPI, predictive power, and certain practical criteria, including timeliness and credibility. They conclude that CPIX still satisfies all the empirical and practical criteria.

Growth in the Canadian economy is projected to reach 2.8 per cent this year before slowing to 2.0 per cent next year and 1.6 per cent in 2019.

Economic activities typically involve coordination among a large number of agents. These agents have to anticipate what other agents think before making their own decisions.