Search

When a bank holds a lot of safe assets, it is well situated to deal with funding stress. But when all banks hold a lot of safe assets, a pecuniary externality implies that their (wholesale) funding costs increase. This reduces banks’ ability to hold capital buffers and thus, paradoxically, increases the frequency of funding stress.

We identify and quantify fiscal news shocks, compiling events (2001–2023) that altered the expected path of U.S. defense expenditure. For each event, we estimate market-implied shifts in expected spending. A shift-share analysis yields a two-year, metropolitan statistical area–level GDP multiplier of approximately 1 for U.S. military build-ups.

Trading flows affect Government of Canada bond prices. Our estimates suggest a sale of 1% of the available supply of bonds typically lowers bond prices by 0.2%. From 2000 to 2025, demand from institutional investors, such as Canadian pension funds and foreign investors, explains 69% of quarterly price variation, with the remainder explained by changes in the supply of bonds.

We consider structural vector autoregressions that are identified through stochastic volatility. Our analysis focuses on whether a particular structural shock can be identified through heteroskedasticity without imposing any sign or exclusion restrictions.

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.

Extreme weather events contribute to increased volatility in both economic activity and prices, interfering with the assessment of the true underlying trends of the economy. With this in mind, we conduct a timely assessment of the impact of natural disasters on Canadian gross domestic product (GDP).

Using newly matched data on US defense contracts and restricted administrative employment data, we show that the employment effects of defense procurement are costly, concentrated and slow to diffuse.

We draw on the Canadian experience to examine how monetary and macroprudential policies interact and possibly complement each other in achieving their respective price and financial stability objectives.

We assess whether unconventional monetary and fiscal policy implemented in response to the COVID-19 pandemic in the U.S. contribute to the 2021-2023 inflation surge through the lens of several different empirical methodologies and establish a null result.

This note analyzes different economic models of a central bank digital currency (CBDC) ecosystem where the central bank chooses different levels of market involvement and usage of policy levers. The analysis suggests that there are trade-offs between the costs to the central bank and its ability to achieve policy goals like universal access.