In April 2022, the Bank of Canada announced that it would continue to use a floor system to implement monetary policy by providing a sufficiently large quantity of settlement balances to enable the overnight repo rate to trade at close to the deposit rate. In contrast, the Bank's guiding...

Using confidential information on banks' portfolios, inaccessible to market participants, we show that banks that emphasize the environment in their disclosures extend a higher volume of credit to brown borrowers, without charging higher interest rates or shortening debt maturity. These results...

Modernizing Canada's wholesale payments system to Lynx from the Large Value Transfer System (LVTS) brings two key changes: (1) the settlement model shifts from a hybrid system that combined components of both real-time gross settlement (RTGS) and deferred net settlement (DNS) to an RTGS system;...

We study the role of intermediaries (brokers) in the Canadian mortgage market. In this market, consumers can search for quotes in one of two ways: on their own or via a broker. We provide descriptive evidence that borrowers who transact through brokers are different from those who do not....

I study the impact of banking market concentration and wholesale funding reliance on the transmission of monetary policy shocks to mortgage rates. I empirically demonstrate that in the United States, banks with higher reliance on wholesale funding in concentrated (competitive) deposit markets...

This paper measures how both geographical and cultural proximity of bank branches affect household credit choice and pricing. We examine both types of proximity jointly to separately identify the importance of soft information versus alternative mechanisms. Using a detailed household-level...

High-value payment systems (HVPSs) are typically liquidity-intensive because the payment requests are indivisible and settled on a gross basis. Finding the right order in which payments should be processed to maximize the liquidity efficiency of these systems is an NP-hard combinatorial...

This paper studies, theoretically and empirically, the unintended consequences of mandatory retention rules in securitization. The Dodd-Frank Act and the EU Securitisation Regulation both impose a 5% mandatory retention requirement to motivate screening and monitoring. I first propose a novel...

Using detailed data from Canada's new high-value payment system (HVPS), we show how participants of the system save liquidity by exploiting the new gridlock resolution arrangement. These observed behaviors are consistent with the equilibrium of a "gridlock game" that captures the key incentives...

This paper examines inefficiencies arising from a lack of long-term contracting in small business lending in China. I develop and estimate a dynamic model where firms repeatedly interact with the same lender. All loans are short-term. Collateral can be used to deter a strategic default by a...