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Businesses’ expectations for the pace of economic activity over the next 12 months remain positive, although somewhat less so than in the winter survey.

Supplemental questions on the appreciation of the Canadian dollar - April 2004

Supplemental questions on the appreciation of the Canadian dollar - February 2004

Unregulated capital flows are likely excessive during a stagflation episode, owing to a macroeconomic externality operating through the economy’s supply side. Inflows raise domestic wages and cause unwelcome upward pressure on firm costs, yet market forces likely generate such inflows. Optimal capital flow management instead requires net outflows.

This paper develops a search-theoretic model to study the interaction between banking and monetary policy and how this interaction affects the allocation and welfare. Regarding how banking affects the welfare costs of inflation: First, we find that, with banking, inflation generates smaller welfare costs.

Many central banks around the world have embraced inflation targeting as a monetary policy framework. Interest is growing, however, in price-level targeting as an alternative. The choice of frameworks has important consequences for financial contracts, most of which are not fully indexed to the price level. Changes in the price level therefore lead to changes in the real value of contracts.

The Bank of Canada conducted a Wage Setting Survey with a sample of 200 private sector firms from mid-October 2007 to May 2008. Results indicate that wage adjustments for the Canadian non-union private workforce are overwhelmingly time dependent, with a fixed duration of one year, and are clustered in the first four months of the year, suggesting that wage stickiness may not be constant over the year.

Many explanations for the decline in real interest rates over the last 30 years point to the role that population aging or rising income inequality plays in increasing the long-run aggregate demand for assets. Notwithstanding the importance of such factors, the starting point of this paper is to show that the major change driving household asset demand over this period is instead an increased desire—for a given age and income level—to hold assets.

This paper examines the sale of durable goods by a monopolist in a stochastic partil equilibrium setting. It analyzes the responses of prices and output to various types of shocks and notes the differences with non-durable goods and competitive markets. It shows that behavior in this model with constant marginal costs of production is in […]

The three articles in this issue provide an overview of the monetary policy decision-making process at the Bank of Canada, a discussion of Bank research on the assessment of vulnerabilities in the financial system and a description of recent fragmentation in Canadian equity markets.

Using turnover ratios, Anderson and Lavoie describe the recent evolution of liquidity in various secondary government bond markets, focusing specifically on the market for Government of Canada securities. They attribute much of the recent variation in liquidity to such cyclical factors as changes in the interest rate environment and investors' appetite for risk, as well as developments in equity markets in the late 1990s. They also examine longer-term structural and policy-related trends, including the rate of adoption of financial and technological innovations and the level of government borrowing and debt-management initiatives.

In many industries, firms usually have two choices when expanding into new markets: They can either build a new plant (greenfield entry) or they can acquire an existing incumbent. In the U.S. cement industry, the comparative advantage (e.g., TFP or size) of entrants versus incumbents and regulatory entry barriers are important factors that determine the means of expansion.