August 23, 2003
Staff research, Publications
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August 23, 2003
Bank of Canada Review - Summer 2003
Cover page
Canadian World War I War Bond
The $100 10-year bond of the FirstWar Loan is slightly larger than a sheet of legal-sized paper. It forms part of the National Currency Collection, Bank of Canada.
Photographed by Gord Carter, Ottawa.
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August 22, 2003
Measuring Interest Rate Expectations in Canada
Financial market expectations regarding future changes in the target for the overnight rate of interest are an important source of information for the Bank of Canada. Financial markets are the mechanism through which the policy rate affects other financial variables, such as longer-term interest rates, the exchange rate, and other asset prices. An accurate measure of their expectations can therefore help policy-makers assess the potential impact of contemplated changes. Johnson focuses on the expectations hypothesis, which measures expectations of future levels of the target overnight rate as implied by current money market yields. Although expectations can be derived from the current yield on any short-term fixed-income asset, some assets have proven to be more accurate predictors than others. The implementation of a policy of fixed-announcements dates has coincided with the increased predictive power of these short-term assets. As a result of this improvement, a relatively simple model of the yield curve can now provide an accurate measure of financial market expectations. -
August 21, 2003
Dollarization in Canada: An Update
The authors describe a special survey of the payment and financial-reporting practices of Canadian firms conducted by the Bank of Canada's regional offices to determine if the U.S. dollar has started to displace the Canadian dollar as a preferred unit of account. A cross-section of firms was asked what currency (or currencies) they used: (i) for quoting sales to Canadian customers, (ii) for quoting prices to foreigners, (iii) for reporting their financial results, and (iv) for quoting salaries and wages. The survey results reported here extend some earlier results reported in a previous Review article by Murray and Powell. The data indicate that, despite the dominance of the U.S. dollar in world trade and as an international standard of value, use of the U.S. dollar in Canada is very limited. The vast majority of Canadian firms price their products and keep their financial statements in Canadian dollars, and very few workers in Canada have their salaries paid in a foreign currency. The Canadian dollar is still strongly preferred for most pricing and financial-reporting activities in Canada, and there is very little evidence of "dollarization." -
Forecasting and Analyzing World Commodity Prices
The authors develop simple econometric models to analyze and forecast two components of the Bank of Canada commodity price index: the Bank of Canada non-energy (BCNE) commodity prices and the West Texas Intermediate crude oil price. They present different methodologies to identify transitory and permanent components of movements in these prices. -
What Does the Risk-Appetite Index Measure?
Explanations of changes in asset prices as being due to exogenous changes in risk appetite, although arguably controversial, have been popular in the financial community and have also received some attention in attempts to account for recent financial crises. Operational versions of these explanations are based on the assumption that changes in asset prices can be decomposed into a part that can be attributed to changes in riskiness and a part attributable to changes in risk aversion, and that some quantitative measure can capture these effects in isolation. -
The Construction of Continuity-Adjusted Monetary Aggregate Components
Changes in the financial industry result in new data that are inconsistent with the former presentation, and therefore adjustments are required to "adjust" or smooth out these breaks to establish continuity. -
July 17, 2003
Monetary Policy Report Update – July 2003
Since the April Monetary Policy Report, there have been a number of unanticipated developments that have changed the outlook for inflation and economic activity in Canada. -
Dynamic Factor Analysis for Measuring Money
Technological innovations in the financial industry pose major problems for the measurement of monetary aggregates. The authors describe work on a new measure of money that has a more satisfactory means of identifying and removing the effects of financial innovations. -
The U.S. Stock Market and Fundamentals: A Historical Decomposition
The authors identify the fundamentals behind the dynamics of the U.S. stock market over the past 30 years. They specify a structural vector-error-correction model following the methodology of King, Plosser, Stock, and Watson (1991).