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We investigate the uncertainty around stock returns at different investment horizons. Since a return is either a loss or a gain, we categorize return uncertainty into two components—loss uncertainty and gain uncertainty. We then use these components to evaluate investment.

As a guide for the conduct of monetary policy, most central banks make use of a trend inflation index similar to that employed by the Bank of Canada: the CPI excluding food, energy, and the effect of indirect taxes. In addition to their basic reference index, some central banks regularly publish statistical measures of the trend rate of inflation. The method used for producing these measures is, for the most part, based on the hypothesis that extreme price fluctuations generally reflect temporary shocks to the inflation rate, rather than its underlying trend. In this paper, the author offers a broad survey of studies on the measurement of trend inflation that have been published by the Bank of Canada and presents the results of the most recent work on the subject. Particular attention is paid to two statistical measures that the Bank follows more closely than other measures; namely, the CPIX, a price index that excludes eight of the most volatile CPI components, and CPIW, a measure that retains all the components of the overall index but gives a lower weighting to the most volatile.

We develop a model that links investors’ decisions to enter or exit the Bitcoin market with their beliefs about the survival of Bitcoin. Empirical testing using Canadian data reveals that beliefs strongly influence both entries and exits, and this impact varies with time and ownership status.

The industry standard for seasonally adjusting data, X-13ARIMA-SEATS, is not suitable for high-frequency data. We summarize and assess several of the most popular seasonal adjustment methods for weekly data given the increased availability and promise of non-traditional data at higher frequencies.

This study uses the COVID-19 travel restrictions to estimate foreign demand for Canadian banknotes. It reveals that international visitors accounted for about 10% of all $100 CAD notes in circulation pre-pandemic, with each visitor carrying an average of $165 in hundred-dollar bills.

Governor Tiff Macklem discusses how the economy will continue to adjust to higher interest rates in the year ahead, and outlines what Canadians can expect from the Bank of Canada.

This paper presents a structural framework of the global oil market that relies on information on global fuel consumption to identify flow demand for oil. We show that under mild identifying assumptions, data on global fuel consumption help to provide comparatively sharp insights on elasticities and other key structural parameters of the global oil market.

In this article, the authors build on the framework used in the Bank of Canada's Financial System Review to assess the evolution of household indebtedness and financial vulnerabilities in response to changing economic conditions. To achieve this, they first compare two microdata sets generated by Ipsos Reid's Canadian Financial Monitor and Statistics Canada's Survey of Financial Security. They find that the surveys are broadly comparable, despite methodological differences. This enables them to use the combined information content for the identification of the threshold value of the debt-service ratio (DSR). The article then presents an innovative framework that uses household-level microdata to simulate changes in the distribution of the DSR under various stress scenarios. The authors show how this framework can be used by analyzing the effects of two different scenarios on the distribution of the debt-service ratio and the impact on vulnerable households. This tool will enable researchers to refine their analyses of current risks to the financial health of Canadian households. The article concludes with comments on future directions for refining the Bank's analyses of household sector risk.

We find that the CPI and PPI inflation indexes co-moved strongly throughout the late 20th century, but their correlation has fallen substantially since the early 2000s. We offer a structural explanation for this divergence based on the growth of global supply chains since 2000. This finding offers a unique perspective for the future design of optimal monetary policy.

On 8 and 9 June 2000, the Bank held a seminar to examine some key issues affecting the upcoming decision on Canada's inflation-control target for the period after 2001. The main issues covered at the seminar were the extent of downward nominal-wage rigidity and its implications for employment as well as the relative merits of price-level targeting versus inflation targeting. Another critical question that was discussed was how to balance the evidence on all the relevant issues in order to develop an overall view on the appropriate long-run target. The author gives a brief overview of the seminar followed by detailed summaries of individual papers.