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We analyze money financing of fiscal transfers (helicopter money) in two simple New Keynesian models: a “textbook” model in which all money is non-interest-bearing (e.g., all money is currency), and a more realistic model with interest-bearing reserves.

Should a CBDC be more like cash or bank deposits? An interest-bearing, cash-like CBDC not only makes payments more efficient but also increases total demand. This has positive effects on other transactions, inducing more deposit taking and lending and, thus, bank intermediation.

The initiatives reviewed by the author were undertaken to ensure a liquid and well-functioning market for Government of Canada securities in light of the significant shift in the government's financial position. They include changes made in 1998 by the Bank of Canada and the government to the rules governing auctions and to the Bank's surveillance of the auction process, changes to the treasury bill and bond programs, and implementation of a pilot buyback program for Government of Canada marketable bonds. In addition, the Investment Dealers Association of Canada adopted a code of conduct for the secondary market. These initiatives were well received by the market and appear to have had a positive impact. The Bank and the government are, however, continuing their search for ways to maintain and enhance the efficiency of this market.

In this issue, Bank researchers discuss inflation dynamics and global trade following the 2007–09 financial crisis. Other articles explore changes to the governance and regulation of the Canadian payments system and outline the banking services provided by the Bank of Canada. Finally, the results of the 2013 Methods-of-Payment Survey are presented.

Does consumption smoothing fundamentally decrease during macroeconomic disasters? This paper uses a large historical dataset (1870–2016) for 16 industrial economies to show that during macroeconomic disasters (e.g., wars, pandemics, depressions) aggregate consumption and income are significantly less decoupled than during normal times.

In an economy where production takes place in multiple stages and is subject to financial frictions, how firms finance intermediate inputs matters for aggregate outcomes. This paper focuses on trade credit—the lending and borrowing of input goods between firms—and quantifies its aggregate impacts during the Great Recession.

The Bank of Canada maintains regular contact with financial institutions as part of the information-gathering process that feeds into the larger set of information used to arrive at its monetary policy decision. Since 1999, the Bank has been conducting a quarterly survey of the business-lending practices of major Canadian financial institutions. Analysis of the information collected shows that it is correlated with future growth in both credit and business investment. This article focuses on how the survey is conducted and describes the construction of the summary statistics, highlighting the key statistical relationships in the historical survey data.

This paper proposes a method for estimating the joint distribution of two or more variables when only their marginal distributions and the distribution of their aggregates are observed. Nonparametric identification is achieved by modelling dependence using a latent common-factor structure.

How might one simulate a million realistic income paths and compute their statistical moments in under a second? Using CUDA-based methods to estimate the Canadian earnings process, I find that the distribution of labour income growth is sharply peaked with heavy tails—similar to that in the United States.

We identify two channels that affect the relationship between inflation and unemployment. First, inflation lowers wages because unemployed suffer more from inflation than employed, generating a positive relationship. Second, inflation increases firms’ financing costs, generating a negative relationship. Improvements in firm financing conditions can induce the relationship to switch signs.