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Central banks face considerable uncertainty when conducting monetary policy. The COVID-19 pandemic brought this issue back to the forefront of policy discussions. We draw from academic literature to review key sources of uncertainty and how they affect the conduct of monetary policy.

One year later, we review the events that took place in Canadian fixed-income markets at the beginning of the COVID-19 crisis and propose potential policy research questions for future work.

This paper studies optimal need-based financial aid when parental transfers—unobserved by policymakers—vary across and within families of similar means. Using data on U.S. college students, I document substantial inequality in parental transfers, especially among wealthier families. I then analyze how this affects aid design aimed at reducing inefficiencies from borrowing constraints and the aid itself.

Press releases announcing and explaining monetary policy decisions play a critical role in the communication strategy of central banks. Because of their market-moving potential, it is particularly important how they are drafted. Often, central banks start from the previous statement and update the earlier text with only small changes.

This article summarizes the proceedings of a conference hosted by the Bank of Canada in May 1998. This was the second Bank conference to focus directly on issues concerning financial markets. The topic for 1998—the extraction of information from the prices of financial assets—has been an area of extensive research by central banks worldwide because of its connection to monetary policy. The Bank wanted to encourage such work by Canadian researchers as well as solicit feedback on work conducted internally. It also wanted to broaden the understanding of the interplay in the markets between central banks and other participants. It therefore assembled a wide mix of researchers, central bankers, and market participants. The summary briefly outlines the papers presented as well as the wrap-up discussion.

The author traces developments in the Canadian covered bond market. Covered bonds could be a valuable way to provide a stable and diverse source of funding, particularly for smaller banks. However, higher issuance could increase banks’ vulnerability to liquidity stress, with implications for the broader financial system. The author argues that these benefits and challenges can be balanced in a well-designed policy framework.

We propose a functional principal components method that accounts for stratified random sample weighting and time dependence in the observations to understand the evolution of distributions of monthly micro-level consumer prices for the United Kingdom (UK).

Changes in domestic interest rates affect the value of the Canadian dollar less than changes in the risk premium do. These variations often occur when a broad shift in risk sentiment occurs in global markets. Ultimately, the value of the currency reflects long-term, slow-moving features of the economies.

We propose a framework that allows a portfolio manager to quantify the probability of simultaneous losses in multiple assets of a collateral portfolio. Using this framework, we propose a methodology to conduct stress tests on the market value of the portfolio of collateral when undesirable extreme dependence occurs.

The issue addressed in this article is the extent to which monetary policy in Canada should respond to asset-price bubbles. The article concludes that maintaining low and stable consumer price inflation is the best contribution that monetary policy can make to promoting economic and financial stability, even when the economy experiences asset-price bubbles. In extreme circumstances—when an asset-price bubble is well identified and likely to have significant costs to the economy when it bursts—monetary policy might better maintain low and stable consumer price inflation by leaning against a particular bubble even though it may mean that inflation deviates temporarily from its target. Such a strategy might reduce the risk that a crash in asset prices could lead to a recession and to inflation markedly below target in the longer run. The circumstances where this strategy is possible will be rare because economists are far from being able to determine consistently and reliably when leaning against a particular bubble is likely to do more harm than good. Housing-price bubbles should be a greater concern for Canadian monetary policy than equity-price bubbles, since rising housing prices are more likely to reflect excessively easy domestic credit conditions than are equity prices, which are largely determined in global markets.