Search

This Report presents the Bank of Canada’s assessment of the trend of inflation in Canada and explains the monetary policy actions deemed necessary to keep inflation within the Bank’s inflation-control target range.

During the past six months, global economic uncertainties have intensified, largely as a result of developments in emerging-market economies.

The five articles in this issue present research and analysis by Bank staff covering a variety of topics: the growth of Canadian-dollar-denominated assets in official foreign reserves; the emergence of platform-based digital currencies; methods of forecasting the real price of oil; measures of uncertainty in monetary policy; and the recent performance of the labour market in Canada and the United States.

Modeling and estimating persistent discrete data can be challenging. In this paper, we use an autoregressive panel probit model where the autocorrelation in the discrete variable is driven by the autocorrelation in the latent variable. In such a non-linear model, the autocorrelation in an unobserved variable results in an intractable likelihood containing high-dimensional integrals.

The Canadian economy regained strong momentum in 1999 as the U.S. economy remained vigorous, the global economy recovered, and commodity prices moved upwards.

In Canada, temporary workers account for 14 per cent of jobs in the non-farm business sector, are present in a range of industries, and account for 40 per cent of the total job reallocation. Yet most models of job reallocation abstract from temporary workers.

Six months ago, at the time of the last Monetary Policy Report, the global economic and financial environment was volatile and highly uncertain because of the adverse situation in Asia and the fallout from the Russian debt moratorium.

This paper studies the implications of model uncertainty for wealth distribution in a tractable general equilibrium model with a borrowing constraint and robustness à la Hansen and Sargent (2008). Households confront model uncertainty about the process driving the return of the risky asset, and they choose robust policies.

In the aftermath of the financial crisis, there is interest in reforming bank regulation such that capital requirements are more closely linked to a bank's contribution to the overall risk of the financial system. In our paper we compare alternative mechanisms for allocating the overall risk of a banking system to its member banks.

In the last half-year, the economic expansion in Canada has become well established, supported by low inflation, highly stimulative monetary conditions, and a strong U.S. economy.