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News media present competing interpretations of what breaking news implies for the macroeconomy. Recent examples include news reporting on high inflation and yield curve inversions. Do these narratives shape macroeconomic sentiment? In this paper, we highlight the importance of narratives using evidence linking traditional media and social media.

In the 1970s and 1980s we found - in common with many other countries - that high and variable rates of inflation created a lot of economic damage. And it took a long time and a lot of work with various monetary policy frameworks before we got back on track.

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.

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.

Investors who trade based on good research are said to be the backbone of stock markets: They conduct research to discover the value of stocks and, through their trading, guide financial prices to reflect true value. What can make their job difficult is that high-speed, short-term traders could use machine learning and other technologies to infer when informed investors are trading.

This survey took place between August 2 and August 23, 2022. Follow-up interviews took place in September. Expectations for inflation one to two years ahead have continued to rise because consumers anticipate supply chain disruptions and elevated oil prices will persist. In contrast, expectations for inflation five years ahead have eased to near pre-pandemic levels. Still, consumers are more divided this quarter about where inflation will end up in the long term.

Product standards are omnipresent in industrialized societies. Though standardization can be beneficial for domestic producers, divergent product standards have been categorized as a major obstacle to international trade. This paper quantifies the effect of standard harmonization on trade flows and characterizes the extent to which it changes the cost and demand structure of exporting.

Consumers, businesses and banks make millions of payments each day using a variety of instruments, such as debit cards, cheques and wires. Canada is currently developing three new systems to process these transactions: Lynx, Settlement Optimization Engine (SOE) and Real-Time Rail (RTR).

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.

The history of Canada's money provides a unique perspective from which to view the growth and development of the Canadian economy and Canada as a nation. Author James Powell traces the evolution of Canadian money form its pre-colonial origins to the present day, highlighting the currency chaos of the colonial period, as well as the effects of two world wars and the Great Depression.