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This note finds evidence of a positive and nonlinear relationship between mortgage interest costs (MIC) and rental inflation: the impact of MIC on rents is small when population growth is near its historical norm, but significantly stronger during periods of rapid population growth.

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.

Senior Deputy Governor Tiff Macklem discusses flexible inflation targeting and “good” and “bad” disinflation.

Should managers be paid in stock options if they provide stock-market participants with information about the firm? This paper studies how firm owners trade off the benefit of stock-price incentives and better-informed market participants against the cost of potential stock-price manipulation.

Crowdfunding may enable unique products to reach the consumer market. I model a crowdfunding technology that publicly screens consumer demand early in the production process. In this model, entrepreneurs like crowdfunding for risky projects where demand is uncertain, but not for large, safe projects or for projects where production costs are uncertain.

The formulation of monetary policy at the Bank of Canada relies on the analysis of a broad set of economic information. Greater availability of immediate and detailed information would improve real-time economic decision making. Technological advances have provided an opportunity to exploit “big data” - the vast amount of digital data from business transactions, social media and networked computers. Big data can be a complement to traditional information sources, offering fresh insight for the monitoring of economic activity and inflation.

Do bond risk premiums influence the effects of debt maturity operations? Using a model with realistic bond risk premiums, we show that maturity operations have sizable effects on expected inflation and output when the central bank passively responds to inflation and the fiscal authority weakly responds to the debt level.

Towards the end of the 1980s and into the early 1990s, the Canadian economy experienced a number of structural changes. These included free trade agreements (both the FTA and NAFTA), significant technological advances, deregulation in many sectors of the economy, the arrival of large, U.S.-based retailers, and the introduction of the GST.

We demonstrate the ability of reinforcement learning techniques to estimate the best-response functions of banks participating in high-value payments systems—a real-world strategic game of incomplete information.

Standard theories of price adjustment are based on the problem of a single-product firm, and therefore they may not be well suited to analyze price dynamics in the economy with multiproduct firms.