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Recent work at the Bank of Canada studied the impact of default in Canada’s large-value payments system, and concluded that participants could readily manage their potential losses (McVanel 2005). In an extension of that work, the authors use a much larger set of daily payments data – with three times as many observations – to […]

We identify and quantify fiscal news shocks, compiling events (2001–2023) that altered the expected path of U.S. defense expenditure. For each event, we estimate market-implied shifts in expected spending. A shift-share analysis yields a two-year, metropolitan statistical area–level GDP multiplier of approximately 1 for U.S. military build-ups.

The financial system makes an important contribution to the welfare of all Canadians. The ability of households and firms to confidently hold and transfer financial assets is one of the fundamental building blocks of the Canadian economy.

Text of major 1995 lecture by Bank Governor Gordon Thiessen, plus articles from Bank of Canada Review and other sources

In the 1970s and 1980s we found - in common with many other countries - that high and variable rates of inflation created a lot of economic damage. And it took a long time and a lot of work with various monetary policy frameworks before we got back on track.

We provide evidence regarding the dynamic behaviour of net labour flows across U.S. states in response to a positive technology shock. Technology shocks are identified as disturbances that increase relative state productivity in the long run for 226 state pairs, encompassing 80 per cent of labour flows across U.S. states in the 1976 - 2008 period.

We analyze micro-level data from the Canadian Survey of Consumer Expectations through the lens of a heterogeneous-expectations model to study how inflation expectations form over the business cycle. We provide new insights into how households form expectations, documenting that forecasting behaviours, attention and noise in beliefs vary across socio-demographic groups and correlate with views about monetary policy.

Stress testing, at its most general level, is an investigation of the performance of an entity under abnormal operating conditions.

Inflation in Canada remains high but should come down quickly to around 3% in the middle of this year because of lower energy prices, improved supply chains and restrictive monetary policy. The Bank projects that inflation will reach the 2% target by the end of 2024.

Freedman and Engert focus on the changing pattern of lending and borrowing in Canada in the past thirty to forty years, including the types of financial instruments used and the relative roles of financial institutions and financial markets. They examine how borrowing mechanisms have changed over time and consider the challenges facing the Canadian financial sector, including whether our financial markets are in danger of disappearing because of the size and pre-eminence of U.S. financial markets. Some of the trends examined here include syndicated lending, securitization, and credit derivatives, a form of financial engineering that has become increasingly important in the last few years. They also study bond and equity markets to determine whether Canadian capital markets have been hollowed out or abandoned by Canadian firms and conclude that the data do not provide much support for that view.