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Interconnectedness among insurers and reinsurers at a global level is not well understood and may pose a significant risk to the sector, with implications for the macroeconomy. Models of the complex interactions among reinsurers and with other participants in the financial system and the real economy are at a very early stage of development.

The recent financial crisis has led to the development of new regulations to control risk in designated payment systems, and the implementation of new credit risk management standards is one of the key issues. In this paper, we study various credit risk management schemes for the Canadian retail payment system (ACSS) that are designed to cover the exposure of a defaulting member.

We estimate a continuous-time model with stochastic volatility and dynamic crash probability for the S&P 500 index and find that market illiquidity dominates other factors in explaining the stock market crash risk. While the crash probability is time-varying, its dynamic depends only weakly on return variance once we include market illiquidity as an economic variable in the model.

We study how changes in prudential requirements affect cross-border lending of Canadian banks by utilizing an index that aggregates adjustments in key regulatory instruments across jurisdictions.

The 2007–09 global financial crisis has led policy-makers around the world, including central banks, to refocus their efforts to promote financial stability. As part of this process, central banks became quite active in supporting financial stability in a variety of ways, such as publicly sharing their assessments of financial system vulnerabilities and risks and helping to strengthen regulation, supervision and macroprudential measures.

We study a cross section of carry-trade-generated currency excess returns in terms of their exposure to global fundamental macroeconomic risk.

The paper studies the determinants of being unbanked in the euro area and the United States as well as the effects of being unbanked on wealth accumulation. Based on household-level data from The Eurosystem Household Finance and Consumption Survey and the U.S. Survey of Consumer Finances, it first documents that there are, respectively, 3.6 per cent and 7.5 per cent of unbanked households in the two economies.

This note introduces several market-based indicators and examines how they can further inform the Bank of Canada’s vulnerability assessment of Canadian financial institutions. Market-based indicators of leverage suggest that the solvency risk for major Canadian banks has increased since the beginning of the oil-price correction in the second half of 2014.

This report investigates how the markets for repurchase agreements and securities-lending agreements support the liquidity of Canadian bond markets. It also discusses how recent regulatory changes, as well as low interest rates and settlement failures, are potentially affecting securities-financing markets and, as a result, bond market liquidity.

The authors review the eight largest public pension funds in Canada. These funds are an important source of retirement income for Canadians. They are also significant investors, with net assets under management of over $1 trillion. The authors outline the investment strategies of the funds and how they interact with financial institutions and participate in financial markets. They also discuss the ways in which the funds’ risk-management frameworks could contribute to financial system stability and how they minimize potential vulnerabilities.