The household debt-to-disposable income ratio in Canada increased from 110 per cent in 1999 to 127 per cent in 2007. This increase has raised questions about the ability of households to service their increased debt if faced with a negative economic or socio-economic shock. The debt service...

The lack of consolidated Canadian micro data on household balance sheets and expenditures has been an important impediment to empirical research into real-financial linkages in the Canadian household sector. Our paper attempts to fill this data gap by merging household balance sheet data from...

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...