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Should managers be paid in stock options if they provide stock-market participants with information about the firm? This paper studies how firm owners trade off the benefit of stock-price incentives and better-informed market participants against the cost of potential stock-price manipulation.

We review the nascent but fast-growing literature on central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), focusing on their potential impacts on private banks. We evaluate these impacts in three areas of traditional banking: payments, lending and liquidity and maturity transformation. We also take a broader look at CBDCs and highlight two promising directions for future research.

In this paper, I extend the results of Moskowitz and Vissing-Jørgensen (2002) on the returns to entrepreneurial investments in the United States. First, following the authors’ methodology I replicate the original findings from the Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF) for the period 1989–1998 and show that the returns to private and public equity are similar.

Suppose that the dynamics of the macroeconomy were given by (partly) random fluctuations between two equilibria: "good" and "bad."

We document the outcome of an options decimalization pilot on Canada’s derivatives exchange. Decimalization improves measures of liquidity and price efficiency. The impact differs by the moneyness of an option and is greatest for out-of-the-money options.

This issue features three articles that present research and analysis by Bank of Canada staff. The first updates previous Bank estimates of measurement bias in the Canadian consumer price index; the second uses a new term-structure model to analyze the relationship between the short-term policy rate and long-term interest rates; and the third examines indicators of balance-sheet risks at financial institutions in Canada.

Cover page

French Provincial Issues in Canada

The coins pictured on the cover are part of the National Currency Collection, Bank of Canada.
Photography by Gord Carter, Ottawa.

We investigate the macroeconomic impacts of mothballed businesses—those that closed temporarily—on sectoral equilibrium prices after a negative demand shock. Our results suggest that pandemic fiscal support for temporary closures may have eased inflationary pressures.

We draw on the Canadian experience to examine how monetary and macroprudential policies interact and possibly complement each other in achieving their respective price and financial stability objectives.

Many central banks are contemplating whether to issue central bank digital currency. This piece explores the implications as well as potential motivators of such a step.