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Microfinance institutions now serve over 10 million poor households in the developing and developed world, and much of their success has been attributed to their innovative use of peer group lending. There is very little empirical evidence, however, to suggest that group lending schemes offer a superior institutional design over lending programs that serve individual borrowers.

Deputy Governor John Murray discusses the importance of global economic policy coordination in a speech at the State University of New York College in Plattsburgh, New York.

How does the supply of nominal government debt affect the macroeconomy? To answer this question, we propose a portfolio-balance model of the yield curve in which inflation is determined through an interest rate rule.

Recent years have seen renewed interest in the regulation of interbank markets. A review of the literature in this area identifies two gaps: first, the literature has tended to make ad hoc assumptions about the interbank contract space, which makes it difficult to generate convincing policy prescriptions; second, the literature has tended to focus on ex-post interventions that kick in only after an interbank disruption has come underway (e.g., open-market operations, lender-of-last-resort interventions, bail-outs), rather than ex-ante prudential policies.

We summarize the review and renewal process at four central banks (Reserve Bank of New Zealand, Bank of England, Sveriges Riksbank and the US Federal Reserve Bank) and compare them with the process at the Bank of Canada, which has been well-established since 2001.

We provide an analysis of cash trends in Canada before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. We also consider the potential two scenarios for issuance of a central bank digital currency in Canada: the emergence of a cashless society or the widespread use of an alternative digital currency in Canada. Finally, we discuss the Canadian experience in maintaining cash as an efficient and accessible method of payment and store of value.

This paper surveys the empirical literature on the benefits of low inflation, emphasizing contributions since 1990. It follows the framework of a section in the Bank's 1990 Annual Report, "The benefits of price stability."

We propose a model to understand low observed migration rates by considering the interaction between location and wealth decisions. We look at different policies and find that temporary moving vouchers only slightly increase welfare, while lower housing regulations can decrease the welfare gap by lowering house prices nationwide.

This issue features a summary of the Bank’s annual conference, Financial Intermediation and Vulnerabilities, which took place in October 2012, as well as two articles that present analysis of international macroeconomic coordination since the global financial crisis and the U.S. recovery from the Great Recession.

Gordon Thiessen, Governor of the Bank of Canada, delivered the HERMES-Glendon Lecture at York University, Toronto, in March 1995. The speech focussed on the interrelationships of uncertainty and the transmission of monetary policy to the economy. It looked at how the various types of uncertainty influence the behaviour of economic actors, and at how uncertainty affects the transmission of monetary policy through the economy. The first part of the lecture outlines the Bank of Canada's view of the transmission mechanism, with considerable attention paid to the role of uncertainty. In the second part, the various ways in which the Bank has tried to reduce uncertainty are discussed. The various kinds of uncertainty that impinge on the economy and on the policy process are addressed.