Staff Working Papers
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Starting from a Blank Page? Semantic Similarity in Central Bank Communication and Market Volatility
Press releases announcing and explaining monetary policy decisions play a critical role in the communication strategy of central banks. Because of their market-moving potential, it is particularly important how they are drafted. Often, central banks start from the previous statement and update the earlier text with only small changes. -
Output Comovement and Inflation Dynamics in a Two-Sector Model with Durable Goods: The Role of Sticky Information and Heterogeneous Factor Markets
In a simple two-sector New Keynesian model, sticky prices generate a counterfactual negative comovement between the output of durable and nondurable goods following a monetary policy shock. We show that heterogeneous factor markets allow any combination of strictly positive price stickiness to generate positive output comovement. -
Time-Varying Crash Risk: The Role of Stock Market Liquidity
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. -
International Banking and Cross-Border Effects of Regulation: Lessons from Canada
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. -
Relationships in the Interbank Market
The market for central bank reserves is mainly over-the-counter and exhibits a core-periphery network structure. This paper develops a model of relationship lending in the unsecured interbank market. In equilibrium, a tiered lending network arises endogenously as banks choose to build relationships to insure against liquidity shocks and to economize on the cost to trade in the interbank market. -
Global Macro Risks in Currency Excess Returns
We study a cross section of carry-trade-generated currency excess returns in terms of their exposure to global fundamental macroeconomic risk. -
Housing Market Dynamics and Macroprudential Policy
We perform an analysis to determine how well the introduction of a countercyclical loanto- value (LTV) ratio can reduce household indebtedness and housing price fluctuations compared with a monetary policy rule augmented with house price inflation. -
Financial Inclusion—What’s it Worth?
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. -
Financial Crisis Interventions
This paper develops a model of an economy where bank credit supports both productive investment and individual consumption smoothing in the face of idiosyncratic income risk. Bank credit is constrained by bank equity capital. -
The Real-Time Properties of the Bank of Canada’s Staff Output Gap Estimates
We study the revision properties of the Bank of Canada’s staff output gap estimates since the mid-1980s. Our results suggest that the average staff output gap revision has decreased significantly over the past 15 years, in line with recent evidence for the U.S.