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The Bank of Canada's interest in fixed-income markets spans several of its functional areas of responsibility, including monetary policy, funds management, and financial system stability and efficiency. For that reason, the 2006 conference brought together top academics and central bankers from around the world to discuss leading-edge work in the field of fixed-income research. The papers and discussions cover such topics as the efficiency of fixed-income markets, price formation, the determinants of the yield curve, and volatility modelling. This article provides a short summary of each conference paper and the ensuing discussion.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Canadian financial institutions offered debt-relief programs to help borrowers cope with job losses and economic insecurity. We consider the low take-up rates for these programs and suggest that to be effective, such programs must be visible and easy to use.

Repo market imbalances can be large and persistent, and can lift the cost of short-term funding in Canada, including the CORRA benchmark. Banks’ holdings of settlement balances absorbed most of the repo imbalances during QE, but have become far less central by the end of QT.

Positive commodity price shocks reduce labor income inequality in commodity-exporting economies by compressing the skill premium, as unskilled-labor-intensive sectors such as construction expand faster than skill-intensive services. A multisector small-open-economy model shows how saving or spending commodity windfalls can reinforce or moderate this decline in inequality.

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.

The dramatic growth in China's exports of consumer goods such as clothing, toys, and electronics, and imports of primary commodities such as oil and metals is having major effects on global supply and demand. In examining China's role in global relative price changes, Francis finds that downward pressure on the relative prices of consumer goods is likely to persist as China's large labour supply continues its migration into manufacturing. Likewise, China's size and growth will also remain key drivers of global commodities demand for some time. Despite these forces, inflation-targeting central banks have the tools to keep inflation close to target, thus offsetting any persistent upward or downward inflationary pressure.

We study how the interaction of market power and nominal price rigidity influences inflation dynamics. We find that pass-through declines with price stickiness when markets are concentrated, which implies a lower slope of the New Keynesian Phillips curve.

This note investigates whether the recent weakness in inflation in Canada can be related to global factors not included in the current staff analytical framework (domestic slack, movements in commodity prices and in the exchange rate). A global common factor for inflation among selected advanced economies appears to contain marginal information for Canadian inflation beyond what is found in movements in commodity prices and the exchange rate.

We construct and estimate a structural two-stage model of equilibrium in a market for payments in order to quantify the network externalities and identify the main determinants of consumer and merchant decisions.

Cash-futures basis trading has grown alongside the Government of Canada bond futures market. We examine this growth over time in relation to Government of Canada bond and repurchase agreement markets and provide details on the type of market participants that engage in this type of trading activity.