Search

We study the interaction between epidemics and economic decisions in a model that has silent transmission of the virus. We find that rational behaviour strongly diminishes the severity of the epidemic but worsens the economic recession. We also find that the detection and isolation of not only symptomatic individuals but also those who are infected and asymptomatic or mildly symptomatic can reduce the severity of the recession caused by the pandemic.

This report provides a detailed technical description of the updated MacroFinancial Risk Assessment Framework (MFRAF), which replaces the version described in Gauthier, Souissi and Liu (2014) as the Bank of Canada’s stress-testing model for banks with a focus on domestic systemically important banks (D-SIBs).

Unregulated capital flows are likely excessive during a stagflation episode, owing to a macroeconomic externality operating through the economy’s supply side. Inflows raise domestic wages and cause unwelcome upward pressure on firm costs, yet market forces likely generate such inflows. Optimal capital flow management instead requires net outflows.

In an economy where production takes place in multiple stages and is subject to financial frictions, how firms finance intermediate inputs matters for aggregate outcomes. This paper focuses on trade credit—the lending and borrowing of input goods between firms—and quantifies its aggregate impacts during the Great Recession.

Chinese real export growth decelerated considerably during the last decade. This paper argues that the slowdown largely resulted from China moving to a more sophisticated mix of exports: China produced more sophisticated goods over which it had pricing power instead of producing greater volumes of less sophisticated products.

I develop a method for Bayesian estimation of globally solved, non-linear macroeconomic models. The method uses a mixture density network to approximate the initial state distribution. The mixture density network results in more reliable posterior inference compared with the case when the initial states are set to their steady-state values.

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.

The authors present the four common cyclical vulnerabilities that appear in financial systems, providing examples of qualitative and quantitative indicators used to monitor these vulnerabilities across different sectors. They also discuss other inputs to the vulnerability assessment and to the internal process used at the Bank of Canada for identifying, evaluating and communicating vulnerabilities and risks, and highlight some of the key challenges in assessing financial system vulnerabilities and risks.

Trade liberalizations increase the sales and input purchases of productive firms relative to their less productive domestic competitors. This reallocation affects firms’ market power in their product and input markets. I quantify how the labour market power of employers affects the distribution and size of the gains from trade.

The five articles in this issue present research and analysis by Bank staff covering a variety of topics: the growth of Canadian-dollar-denominated assets in official foreign reserves; the emergence of platform-based digital currencies; methods of forecasting the real price of oil; measures of uncertainty in monetary policy; and the recent performance of the labour market in Canada and the United States.