This paper measures market power in a decentralized market where contracts are determined through a search and negotiation process. The mortgage industry has many institutional features which suggest competitiveness: homogeneous contracts, negotiable rates, and, for a given consumer, common...

Payments systems are typically characterized by some degree of tiering, with upstream firms (clearing agents) providing settlement accounts to downstream institutions that wish to clear and settle payments indirectly in these systems (indirect clearers). Clearing agents provide their indirect...

Classical oligopoly models predict that firms differentiate vertically as a way of softening price competition, but some metrics suggest very little quality differentiation in the U.S. auto insurance market. I explain this phenomenon using the fact that risk-averse insurance companies with...

The types of contracts that arise in a typical vertical manufacturer–retailer relationship are more sophisticated than usually assumed in standard macroeconomic models. In addition to setting per-unit prices, manufacturers and retailers revert to non-linear pricing and non-price instruments....

This paper documents a link between the real and financial sides of the economy. We find that retail equity mutual fund flows in Canada are negatively related to current and past changes in a component of the prime and 5-year mortgage rates that is uncorrelated with government rates. The effect...

The authors examine the effect of a trade-off between shared credit risk and liquidity efficiency, among participants in Tranche 2 of the Large Value Transfer System (LVTS T2), on their decisions to leave open, or close, their bilateral credit limits (BCLs) to a participant at risk of imminent...

The Large Value Transfer System (LVTS) for settling large payments, and CDSX for settling debt and equity trades, are two of the main settlement systems in Canada. They are closely linked; for example, at the end of the day the final CDSX payment obligations must settle on the Bank of Canada's...

Recent events in financial markets have underlined the importance of analyzing the link between the financial health of banks and real economic activity. This paper contributes to this analysis by constructing a dynamic general equilibrium model in which the balance sheet of banks affects the...

Stress testing, at its most general level, is an investigation of the performance of an entity under abnormal operating conditions. The authors focus on one set of entities--the Canadian banking sector--and investigate losses in the loans portfolio of this sector as a function of changing...