April 24, 2009 Bank of Canada Announces Details of its Term PRA Operation In accordance with the schedule of term purchase and resale agreement (PRA) auctions announced on 21 April (see schedule), the Bank of Canada announced today that it will conduct a term PRA operation. Content Type(s): Press, Market notices
April 29, 2009 Results for the 29 April 2009 Term Loan Facility Results of today's TLF operation. Content Type(s): Press, Market notices
Why Canada Needs a Flexible Exchange Rate Staff Working Paper 1999-12 John Murray This paper explores the arguments for and against a common currency for Canada and the United States and attempts to determine whether such an arrangement would offer any significant advantages for Canada compared with the present flexible exchange rate system. The paper first reviews the theoretical arguments advanced in the economics literature in support of fixed and flexible currency arrangements. A discussion of Canada's past experience with the two exchange rate systems follows, after which there is a survey of the empirical evidence published on Canada's current and prospective suitability for some form of fixed currency arrangement with the United States. The final section of the paper examines critically a number of concerns raised about the behaviour of the current flexible exchange rate system. Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Topic(s): Exchange rates JEL Code(s): F, F3, F31
Measuring Potential Output within a State-Space Framework Staff Working Paper 1999-9 Maral Kichian In this paper we measure potential output (and consequently the output gap) using state-space models. Given that the estimated output gap is used as an indicator to measure the extent of inflationary pressures in the economy, we evaluate the use of such models for the implementation of monetary policy. Our starting point is the Gerlach […] Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Topic(s): Potential output JEL Code(s): D, D2, D24
Overnight Rate Innovations as a Measure of Monetary Policy Shocks in Vector Autoregressions Staff Working Paper 1996-4 Walter Engert, Ben Fung, Jamie Armour The authors examine the Bank of Canada's overnight rate as a measure of monetary policy in vector autoregression (VAR) models. Since the time series of the Bank's current measure of the overnight rate begins only in 1971, the authors splice it to day loan rate observations to obtain a sufficiently long period of data. Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Topic(s): Economic models, Monetary and financial indicators JEL Code(s): E, E5, E52
The Canadian Experience with Weighted Monetary Aggregates Staff Working Paper 1995-10 David Longworth, Joseph Atta-Mensah This paper compares the empirical performance of Canadian weighted monetary aggregates (in particular, Fisher ideal aggregates) with the current summation aggregates, for their information content and forecasting performance in terms of prices, real output and nominal spending for the period 1971Q1 to 1989Q3. The properties of money-demand equations for these aggregates, particularly their temporal stability, […] Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Topic(s): Monetary aggregates
Regime-Switching Models: A Guide to the Bank of Canada Gauss Procedures Staff Working Paper 1996-3 Simon van Norden, Robert Vigfusson This paper is a user's guide to a set of Gauss procedures developed at the Bank of Canada for estimating regime-switching models. Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Topic(s): Econometric and statistical methods JEL Code(s): C, C6, C63
Monetary Rules When Economic Behaviour Changes Staff Working Paper 1999-8 Robert Amano, Donald Coletti, Tiff Macklem This paper examines the implications of changes in economic behaviour for simple inflation-forecast–based monetary rules of the type currently used at two inflation-targeting central banks. Three types of changes in economic behaviour are considered, changes that are motivated by developments in monetary and fiscal policy in the 1990s: changes in monetary policy credibility, changes in […] Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Topic(s): Credibility, Monetary policy and uncertainty, Monetary policy framework JEL Code(s): E, E5, E52
Switching Between Chartists and Fundamentalists: A Markov Regime-Switching Approach Staff Working Paper 1996-1 Robert Vigfusson Since the early 1980s, models based on economic fundamentals have been poor at explaining the movements in the exchange rate (Messe 1990). In response to this problem, Frankel and Froot (1988) developed a model that uses two approaches to forecast the exchange rate: the fundamentalist approach, which bases the forecast on economic fundamentals, and the chartist approach, which bases the forecast on the past behaviour of the exchange rate. Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Topic(s): Financial markets JEL Code(s): C, C4, C40, G, G1, G12
An Intraday Analysis of the Effectiveness of Foreign Exchange Intervention Staff Working Paper 1999-4 Neil Beattie, Jean-François Fillion This paper assesses the effectiveness of Canada's official foreign exchange intervention in moderating intraday volatility of the Can$/US$ exchange rate, using a 2-1/2-year sample of 10-minute exchange rate data. The use of high frequency data (higher than daily frequency) should help in assessing the impact of intervention since the foreign exchange market is efficient and […] Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Topic(s): Exchange rates, Financial markets JEL Code(s): F, F3, F31, G, G1, G15