How does asset encumbrance affect the fragility of intermediaries subject to rollover risk? We offer a model in which a bank issues covered bonds backed by a pool of assets that is bankruptcy remote and replenished following losses. Encumbering assets allows a bank to raise cheap secured debt...

We model the asset-opacity choice of an intermediary subject to rollover risk in wholesale funding markets. Greater opacity means investors form more dispersed beliefs about an intermediary’s profitability. The endogenous benefit of opacity is lower fragility when profitability is expected to...

There is widespread agreement that, in the United States, higher house prices raise consumption via collateral or possibly wealth effects. The presence of similar channels in Canada would have important implications for monetary policy transmission. We trace the impact of shifts in non-price...

In the months preceding the failure of Lehman Brothers in September 2008, banks were willing to pay a premium over the Federal Reserve's discount window (DW) rate to participate in the much less flexible Term Auction Facility (TAF). We empirically test the predictions of a new signalling model...

We model the opacity and deposit rate choices of banks that imperfectly compete for uninsured deposits, are subject to runs, and face a threat of entry. We show how shocks that increase bank competition or bank transparency increase deposit rates, costly withdrawals, and thus bank fragility....

We outline a three-step framework to investigate stablecoin arrangements and quantitatively assess their risk. The first step is to classify the stablecoin arrangement into three parts-coin structure, transfer system(s) and financial service(s) - and categorize the attributes of each part. The...

This paper explores the extent to which correlated investments in the futures market concentrated systemic risk on large Canadian banks around the 2008 crisis. We find that core banks took positions against the periphery, increasing their systemic risk as a group. On the portfolio level,...