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This article examines the incentives for banks to hold various assets on their balance sheets for use as collateral when the opportunity cost of doing so can be high. Focusing on the five-year period (2002-07) that preceded the financial crisis, it examines the choices made by financial institutions among the assets that are pledged as collateral in Canada's Large Value Transfer System. This serves as a baseline for collateral-management practices during relatively normal times. The results of this study are important for policy-makers, especially the Bank of Canada, which is concerned both about the efficient functioning of fixed-income markets and about the credit risk it ultimately bears in insuring LVTS settlement. The results suggest that relative market liquidity and market-making capacity are important factors in the choice of securities pledged as collateral in the LVTS.

This paper examines the implications of positive news about future asset values that turn out to be incorrect at a later date in an open economy model with banking. The model captures the patterns of bank credit and current account dynamics in Spain between 2000 and 2010. The model finds that the use of unconventional policies leads to a milder bust.

We study constrained-efficient bank capital regulation in a model with market-imposed equity requirements. Banks hold equity buffers to insure against sudden loss of access to funding. However, in the model, banks choose to only partially self-insure because equity is privately costly.

How should policy be designed at high debt levels, when fiscal authorities have little room to adjust taxes? Assigning the monetary authority a role in achieving debt sustainability makes it less effective in stabilizing inflation and output.

In this paper we document Canada’s trade policy response to late-nineteenth- and earlytwentieth-century globalization. We link newly digitized annual product-specific data on the value of Canadian imports and duties paid from 1870–1913 to establishment-specific production and location information drawn from the manuscripts of the 1871 industrial census.

In 1995, the broad aggregate M2+ grew at an annual rate of 4.5 per cent—almost twice the rate recorded in 1994—as competition from mutual funds drew less money from personal savings deposits. An adjusted M2+ aggregate, which internalizes the effect of close substitutes such as CSBs and certain mutual funds, grew by only 3.4 per cent. Gross M1 grew by 8.2 per cent during the year, reflecting an increased demand for transactions balances as market interest rates declined and as banks offered more attractive rates of interest on corporate current account balances. The robust growth of gross M1 in the second half of 1995 suggests a moderate expansion of economic activity in the first half of 1996, while moderate growth in the broad aggregates indicates a rate of monetary expansion consistent with continued low inflation. In this annual review of the monetary aggregates, the authors also introduce a new model, based on calculated deviations of M1 from its long-run demand, which suggests that inflation should remain just below the midpoint of the inflation-control target range over the next couple of years.

Unusually large revisions to CPI-common in recent months stem from increased common movements across consumer price index components amid broad inflationary pressures. With recent revisions, CPI-common is more closely aligned with the Bank of Canada’s other two preferred measures of core inflation. However, caution is necessary when interpreting real-time estimates of CPI-common in the current environment.

In its conduct of monetary policy, the Bank of Canada carefully monitors the pace of monetary expansion for indications about the outlook for inflation and economic activity. In recent years, a number of factors have distorted the growth of the traditional broad and narrow aggregates. In this article, the authors discuss the uncertainty surrounding the classification of deposit instruments that has resulted from the elimination of reserve requirements and from other financial innovations. They introduce two new measures of transactions balances, M1+ and M1++ (described more fully in a technical note in this issue of the Review), that internalize some of the substitutions that have occurred. They attribute the deceleration in M1 growth in 1998 partly to the declining influence of special factors, partly to a lagged response to interest rate increases in 1997 and early 1998, and partly to some temporary tightening in credit conditions in the autumn of 1998. The broad monetary aggregate M2++, which includes all personal savings deposits, life insurance annuities, and mutual funds, grew at a steady pace in 1998, presaging growth of about 4 to 5 per cent in total dollar spending and inflation inside the target range.

We develop a simulation-based procedure to test for stock return predictability with multiple regressors. The process governing the regressors is left completely free and the test procedure remains valid in small samples even in the presence of non-normalities and GARCH-type effects in the stock returns.

Capital-goods imports have become an increasing source of growth for the U.S. economy. To understand this phenomenon, we build a neoclassical growth model with international trade in capital goods in which agents face exogenous paths of total factor and investment-specific productivity measures.