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In accordance with the schedule of Term Loan Facility (TLF) auctions announced on 28 November, the Bank of Canada announced today that it will enter into a 28-day TLF transaction as follows:

Results of today's term PRA operations.

In accordance with the schedule of Term Loan Facility (TLF) auctions announced on 24 April (see schedule), the Bank of Canada announced today that it will conduct a TLF operation.

In accordance with the schedule of term purchase and resale agreement (PRA) auctions for private sector instruments announced on 24 April (see schedule), the Bank of Canada announced today that it will conduct a term PRA operation for private sector instruments.

In a competitive sales environment, merchants are compelled to offer consumers the option of paying for goods and services using a variety of payment methods, including cash, debit card, or credit card. Each method entails different costs and benefits to merchants. To better understand the costs of accepting retail payments, the Bank of Canada surveyed over 500 Canadian merchants and found that most consider cash the least costly. This article investigated this perception by calculating the variable costs per transaction of accepting different means of payment. The findings are that costs for each payment method vary by merchant and transaction value, with debit cards the least costly payment for a broad cross-section of merchants.

In the first, mostly theoretical, part of this article, the author analyses the factors that affect the pass-through of exchange rate movements to consumer prices. In the second part, she studies the recent Canadian experience in this area, starting from 1992. The analysis in the first part of the article is used to investigate why the depreciation of the Canadian dollar by almost 20 per cent between 1992 and 1994 did not produce as much of an increase in the inflation rate as predicted by conventional estimates of the exchange rate pass-through. The author first explains this phenomenon using the factors described in the theoretical part of the article: demand conditions, the costs of adjusting prices, and expectations about the depreciation's duration. She then examines the role of more specific factors, such as the abolition of customs duties on trade between Canada and the United States and the restructuring of the retail market. It is clear that the latter two factors helped neutralize the effect of the depreciation on prices.

The number of job gains and losses across firms in Canada each year is roughly one-fifth the total number of jobs and generally occurs within sectors (industries) rather than across sectors. Since labour reallocation within sectors has been strongly related to productivity growth in Canada, defining the key drivers of this type of reallocation is important, given the higher rates of reallocation and productivity growth in the Untied States than in Canada. This article finds that the appreciation of the Canadian dollar and rising commodity prices led to above-average reallocation of labour across sectors over the 2005-08 period, but that the impact on productivity has been minor. Labour reallocation across firms, however, generates substantial labour productivity gains in manufacturing and the business sector as a whole.

This article summarizes the proceedings of a conference hosted by the Bank of Canada in November 1995. The conference examined the interaction between monetary policy operations and the money market. It provided an opportunity to assess current operations before the introduction of a large-value transfer system leads the Bank to change the techniques it uses to implement monetary policy on a day-to-day basis. From the Bank's perspective, the papers prepared externally provided some useful insights into recent innovations in money markets and their implications for the implementation of monetary policy. Meanwhile, the sessions devoted to the Bank's operations in financial markets were designed to provide market practitioners and academics with further insight into how the Bank operates in these markets.

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1804 Bank of England dollar

This piece is part of the National Currency Collection, Bank of Canada.

Photography by James Zagon.

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Home savings bank: The Northern Bank

The savings bank shown here was issued to account holder 1859 by the Victoria, B.C. branch. It is part of the National Currency Collection, Bank of Canada.

Photography by James Zagon.