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We construct a dataset on Federal Reserve and Bank of Canada non-rate announcement events to provide novel insights into how foreign and domestic monetary policy communications affect the financial markets of open economies. We find that Fed non-rate communications have a stronger impact on long-term interest rates and stock futures, while Bank of Canada communications are relatively more important for short-term interest rates and the exchange rate.

In response to the worst financial crisis since the 1930s, policy-makers around the globe are providing unprecedented stimulus to support economic recovery and are pursuing a radical set of reforms to build a more resilient financial system.

US trade protectionism is making the economic outlook increasingly uncertain. To assess how consumer prices may respond to tariffs, we examine a tariff episode from 2018 using detailed microdata and the synthetic control method.

Futures markets are a potentially valuable source of information about price expectations. Exploiting this information has proved difficult in practice, because time-varying risk premia often render the futures price a poor measure of the market expectation of the price of the underlying asset.

We show how participants in Canada’s new high-value payment system save liquidity by exploiting the new gridlock resolution arrangement. The findings have important implications for the design of these systems and shed light on financial institutions’ liquidity preference.

Exporters frequently change their market destinations. This paper introduces a new approach to identifying the drivers of these decisions over time. Analysis of customs data from China and the UK shows most changes are driven by demand rather than supply-related shocks.

The use of bank notes in Canada for payments has declined consistently for some time, and similar trends are evident in other countries. This has led some observers to predict a cashless society in the future.

This article reviews recent work that uses principal-component analysis to extract information common to indicators from the Bank of Canada’s Business Outlook Survey (BOS). The authors use correlation analysis and an out-of-sample forecasting exercise to assess and compare the information content of the principal component with that of responses to key individual survey questions on growth in real gross domestic product and in real business investment. Results suggest that summarizing the common movements among BOS indicators may provide useful information for forecasting near-term growth in business investment. For growth in real gross domestic product, however, the survey’s balance of opinion on future sales growth appears to be more informative.

We estimate two new equations for Canadian non-commodity exports (NCX) that incorporate three important changes relative to the current equation used at the Bank of Canada.