Search

In this note, we present the Commodities Factor Model (CFM), a dynamic factor model for a large cross-section of energy and non-energy commodity prices. The model decomposes price changes in commodities into a common “global” component, a “block” component confined to subgroups of economically related commodities and an idiosyncratic price shock component.

Deputy Governor Toni Gravelle discusses the Bank’s latest interest rate announcement and explains how efforts to keep financial markets functioning through the COVID-19 crisis will lay a solid foundation for economic recovery

This paper looks at the role mortgage brokers play in helping borrowers generate quotes and qualify for credit. We find that, on average, borrowers that engage with a mortgage broker pay lower interest rates. However, in about 15% of cases, borrowers are steered towards longer amortizing mortgages than they would have chosen absent a broker. Since mortgages with longer amortization have higher total interest costs over the entire life of the mortgage, this steering is expensive.

Current turbulence in Europe is a reminder that the crisis is not over, but has merely entered a new phase. In a world awash with debt, repairing the balance sheets of banks, households and countries will take years.

The uncertainty around future changes to the Federal Reserve target rate varies over time. In our results, the main driver of uncertainty is a “path” factor signaling information about future policy actions, which is filtered from federal funds futures data.

As the title of the conference suggests, we have seen many boom-and-bust cycles in the commodity sector. This raises one obvious and central question: How can we avoid them in the future?

We estimate a continuous-time model with stochastic volatility and dynamic crash probability for the S&P 500 index and find that market illiquidity dominates other factors in explaining the stock market crash risk. While the crash probability is time-varying, its dynamic depends only weakly on return variance once we include market illiquidity as an economic variable in the model.

This technical report describes sampling, weighting and variance estimation for the Bank of Canada’s 2017 Methods-of-Payment Survey. Under quota sampling, a raking ratio method is implemented to generate weights with both post-stratification and nonparametric nonresponse weight adjustments.

Policy implications are derived for an inflation-targeting central bank, whose credibility is endogenous and depends on its past ability to achieve its targets. This is done in a New Keynesian framework with heterogeneous and boundedly rational expectations.

Declining labour market dynamism of workers results in an increasing wedge between their earnings and their marginal product as they age. This wedge and the demographic shift in the earnings shares of older workers can account for 59% of the decline in labor’s share of earnings in the United States.