Search

We build upon new developments in the international trade literature to isolate and quantify the long-run economic impacts of tariff changes on the United States and the global economy.

The Bank projects that the Canadian economy will continue to grow in line with its potential through 2020.

This note reviews the emerging evidence on AI’s labour-market and productivity effects, highlighting early task-level impacts, sizable micro level productivity gains, and the macroeconomic challenges these pose for monetary policy during the transition.

Innovations in communications and information technology and the related globalization of financial markets have created the potential for important changes to the structure of Canadian equity markets. Established marketplaces can now compete more effectively on an inter-regional and international basis. At the same time, reduced costs have lowered the barriers to entry faced by new competitors known as alternative trading systems (ATSs). In response to this heightened competition, established Canadian stock exchanges have taken measures to improve market quality. While regulators see innovation as positive for the development of Canadian markets, there is some concern that market liquidity may be fragmented in the short run. The Canadian Securities Administrators have proposed a framework that attempts to address this issue and that would allow ATSs to compete with traditional exchanges for the first time. The authors provide an overview of the Canadian equity market and its structure, focusing on these recent developments.

We propose a new empirical framework that jointly decomposes the conditional variance of economic time series into a common and a sector-specific uncertainty component. We apply our framework to a disaggregated industrial production series for the US economy. We identify unexpected changes in durable goods uncertainty as drivers of downturns, while unexpected hikes in non-durable goods uncertainty are expansionary.

This issue of the Financial System Review reflects the Bank’s judgment that high household indebtedness and housing market imbalances remain the most important vulnerabilities. While these vulnerabilities remain elevated, policy measures continue to improve the resilience of the financial system. A third vulnerability highlighted in the FSR concerns cyber threats to an interconnected financial system.

In addition to its primary role as the country's central bank, the Bank of Canada also acts as the federal government's banker and financial adviser. One of the activities associated with this role as fiscal agent is managing the government's Canadian dollar balances. This function is examined in this article. The main priority is to ensure that the government has sufficient cash to meet its daily needs. This requires careful forecasting and monitoring of the government's daily receipt and expenditure flows, as well as an ongoing borrowing program to refinance maturing debt and to replenish the balances during periods when outflows, on average, exceed inflows. The cost of borrowing to raise cash balances for the government is considerably higher than the interest earned on any balances that are available "on demand." To reduce this net cost, balances in excess of those required for daily needs are invested in "term" deposits that earn a higher rate of interest than that earned on the demand balances. The net cost of holding government balances has also been reduced through the use of cash management bills, which are flexible, short-term borrowing instruments that complement the government's regular weekly issues of 3-, 6- and 12-month treasury bills.

This issue of the Financial System Review reflects the Bank’s judgment that the overall level of risk to Canada’s financial system remains largely unchanged from six months ago. The Bank continues to highlight two key vulnerabilities related to Canadian households: high levels of indebtedness and housing market imbalances. A third ongoing vulnerability is the potential for fragility in fixed-income market liquidity.

This article summarizes the proceedings of an international research conference hosted by the Bank of Canada in November 2000. The conference marked the fiftieth anniversary of Canada's adoption of a flexible exchange rate, and its title recognizes the seminal contribution of Professor Milton Friedman's article "The Case for Flexible Exchange Rates." His keynote address to the conference is also summarized in the article. The conference papers re-examine many of the arguments raised by Friedman using recent developments in economic theory and econometric techniques. They investigate the experience of a wide range of industrialized and emerging-market economies. The main findings are that a strong case can be made for flexible exchange rates in economies that are large commodity exporters and that have credible low-inflation monetary policies and relatively well-developed financial systems.

External Deputy Governor Nicolas Vincent explores the factors driving recent shifts in Canada’s labour market and the implications for monetary policy.