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The Bank of Canada is using an enhanced dataset that tracks the stock of outstanding mortgages and home equity lines of credit held by federally regulated lenders. This paper highlights some of the new details in the dataset and how they impact the Bank’s understanding of the mortgage market.

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.

Measuring cryptoasset knowledge alongside financial knowledge enhances our understanding of individuals' decisions to purchase cryptoassets. This paper uses microdata from the Bank of Canada’s Bitcoin Omnibus Survey to examine gender differences and the interrelationship between crypto and financial knowledge through an empirical joint analysis.

We find that foreign central banks own a large share of Government of Canada (GoC) bonds and tend to hold their positions for longer than other types of asset managers. This buy-and-hold behaviour could offer benefits. For example, foreign central banks may be less likely than other asset managers to sell bonds and add to strains on market liquidity in periods of turmoil. However, foreign central banks’ buy-and-hold behaviour combined with their minimal lending of GoC bonds in securities-financing markets, as observed in our available data, can potentially lower liquidity because fewer GoC bonds are available for others to transact in secondary markets. Indeed, we find that higher levels of foreign central banks’ GoC bond holdings are related to lower liquidity.

Derivatives exchanges often determine collateral requirements, which are fundamental to market safety, with dated risk models assuming normal returns. However, derivatives returns are heavy-tailed, which leads to the systematic under-collection of collateral (margin). This paper uses extreme value theory (EVT) to evaluate the cost of this margin inadequacy to market participants in the event of default.

This note analyzes mortgage stress tests, a macroprudential tool. We find that when mortgage stress tests are applied to all mortgage purchase originations, they improve credit quality and reduce credit and house price growth. They also improve the resilience of borrowers to financial shocks, such as the large increase in interest rates during 2022–23.

We study the distribution of political speech across U.S. firms. We develop a measure of political engagement based on firms’ communications (earning calls, regulatory filings, and social media) by training a large language model to identify statements that contain political opinions. Using these data, we document five facts about firms’ political engagement.

We investigate the welfare consequences of consumer credit regulation in a dynamic, heterogeneous-agent model with endogenous lender market power. Lenders post credit offers and borrowers—some informed and others uninformed—apply for credit. We calibrate the model to match characteristics of the unsecured consumer credit market and use the calibrated model to evaluate interest rate ceilings.

Using a novel dynamic portfolio balance model of the yield curve for Government of Canada bonds, I find that the Bank of Canada’s Government of Canada Bond Purchase Program reduced Canadian 10-year and 5-year zero-coupon yields by 84 and 52 basis points, respectively.

The Bank of Canada’s Government of Canada Bond Purchase Program, launched in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, lowered the weighted average maturity of the Government of Canada’s debt by approximately 1.4 years. This in turn reduced Canadian 10-year and 5-year zero-coupon yields by 84 and 52 basis points, respectively.