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Since the autumn of 1997, the Bank of Canada's regional offices (located in Halifax, Montréal, Toronto, Calgary, and Vancouver) have conducted consultations with businesses across Canada on a quarterly basis. These consultations are now referred to as the Business Outlook Survey (BOS).

We investigate the risks and opportunities to the mandates of central banks arising from fintech developments.

This paper measures the welfare gains of switching from inflation-targeting to price-level targeting under imperfect credibility. Vestin (2006) shows that when the monetary authority cannot commit to future policy, price-level targeting yields higher welfare than inflation targeting.

The combination of rising current account surpluses in Asia and a growing current account deficit in the United States has raised concerns that the resulting imbalances pose a threat to the world economy, especially if they are reversed in a disorderly manner. Some experts believe that normal market forces will resolve these imbalances over time; others argue that policy-makers should facilitate the adjustment with policies that curb domestic demand in deficit countries and stimulate it in surplus countries. Little and Lafrance provide a guide to the major issues and controversies involved in the debate.

The Bank of Canada's new Quarterly Projection Model, QPM, combines the short-term dynamic properties necessary to support regular economic projections with the consistent behavioural structure necessary for policy analysis.

Macroeconomic projections and risk analyses play an important role in guiding monetary policy decisions. Models are integral to this process. This paper discusses how the Bank of Canada brings research models and lessons learned from those models into the central bank projection environment.

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.

This paper analyzes the optimal quantity of central bank reserves in an economy where reserves and other financial assets provide liquidity benefits. Using a static model, I derive a constrained Friedman rule that characterizes the socially optimal level of reserves, demonstrating that this quantity is neither necessarily large nor small but depends on the marginal benefits of reserves relative to alternative safe assets.

Rising consumer prices may reflect shifts by consumers to new higher-priced products, mostly for durable and semi-durable goods. I apply Bils’ (2009) methodology to newly available Canadian consumer price data for non-shelter goods and services to estimate how price increases can be divided between quality growth and price inflation.

Based on recent research, this article discusses three ways that oil-futures prices can improve our understanding of current conditions and future prospects in the global market for crude oil. First, the response of the oil-futures curve can be used to identify the persistence of oil-price shocks and to obtain an indicator of the rate at which they will diminish. Second, the spread between the current futures price and the spot price of oil can be interpreted as an indicator of the precautionary demand for oil. Third, because oil-futures prices are volatile, forecasts of the future spot price of oil using futures prices should be supplemented with other information to improve their accuracy.