Freeman (1999) proposes a model in which discount window lending and open market operations have different effects. This is important because in most of the literature, these policies are indistinguishable. However, Freeman's argument that the central bank should absorb losses associated with...

A "sunspot" is a variable that has no direct impact on the economy’s fundamental condition, such as preferences, endowments or technologies, but may nonetheless affect economic outcomes through the expectations channel as a coordination device. This paper investigates how people react to...

The Bank of Canada is one of very few central banks that has made records of the intraday timing of its intervention operations available to researchers. The authors investigate the effectiveness of sterilized intervention in the Canadian dollar exchange rate market over the period January 1995...

Do short sales restrictions have an impact on security prices? We address this question in the context of a natural experiment surrounding the short sale ban of 2008 using a comprehensive sample of Canadian stocks cross-listed in the U.S. Among financial stocks, which were singled out by the ban...

Banks reliance on short-term funding has increased over time. While an effective source of financing in good times, the 2007 financial crisis has exposed the vulnerability of banks and ultimately firms to such a liability structure. The authors show that banks that relied most on wholesale...

We conduct experiments with human subjects in a model with a positive production externality in which productivity is a non-decreasing function of the average level of employment of other firms. The model has three steady states: the low and high steady states are expectationally stable...

Payment services offered by non-banks have flourished in recent years. The author provides an overview of the different kinds of non-bank retail payments schemes currently available in Canada, illustrating each by focusing on a specific example. Current players in the Canadian marketplace...

Recent events, such as the East Asian, Mexican, Scandinavian, and Argentinian crises, have sparked considerable interest in exploring how shocks experienced by one country can spread vis-à-vis real and nominal links to other countries' banking systems. Given the large costs associated with...

We use a method similar to Google's PageRank procedure to rank banks in the Canadian Large Value Transfer System (LVTS). Along the way we obtain estimates of the payment processing speeds for the individual banks. These differences in processing speeds are essential for explaining why observed...