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This paper uncovers trends in payment timing in Canada’s Large Value Transfer System (LVTS) from 2003 to 2011. Descriptive analysis shows that LVTS payment activity has not been peaking in the late afternoon since 2008, and the improvement was most significant in 2009.

We analyze data from 2005 through 2009 that uniquely identify categories of traders to assess how speculators such as hedge funds and swap dealers relate to volatility and price changes. Examining various subperiods where price trends are strong, we find little evidence that speculators destabilize financial markets.

I develop a method for Bayesian estimation of globally solved, non-linear macroeconomic models. The method uses a mixture density network to approximate the initial state distribution. The mixture density network results in more reliable posterior inference compared with the case when the initial states are set to their steady-state values.

Senior Deputy Governor Tiff Macklem discusses how price and financial stability help promote growth and mitigate economic cycles and inequality.

This article examines four indicators of balance-sheet risks—leverage, capital, asset liquidity and funding—among different types of financial institutions in Canada over the past three decades. It also discusses relevant developments in the banking sector that could have contributed to the observed dynamics. The authors find that the various risk indicators decreased during the period for most of the non-Big Six financial institutions, but remained relatively unchanged for the Big Six banks. In addition, the balance-sheet risk indicators became more heterogeneous across financial institutions. The observed overall decline and increased heterogeneity follow certain regulatory changes, such as the introduction of the liquidity guidelines on funding in 1995 and the implementation of bank-specific leverage requirements in 2000. Given that these regulations required more balance-sheet risk management, they have likely contributed to the increased resilience of the banking sector.

This issue features three articles that present research and analysis by Bank of Canada staff. The first updates previous Bank estimates of measurement bias in the Canadian consumer price index; the second uses a new term-structure model to analyze the relationship between the short-term policy rate and long-term interest rates; and the third examines indicators of balance-sheet risks at financial institutions in Canada.

In a search model of production, where agents accumulate heterogeneous amounts of human capital, an individual worker's wage depends on average human capital in the searching population.

There has been a systematic increase in the volatility of the real price of crude oil since 1986, followed by a decline in the volatility of oil production since the early 1990s. We explore reasons for this evolution. We show that a likely explanation of this empirical fact is that both the short-run price elasticities of oil demand and of oil supply have declined considerably since the second half of the 1980s.

This paper empirically investigates the possibility that the effects of shocks to output depend on the level of inflation. The analysis extends Elwood's (1998) framework by incorporating in the model an inflation-threshold process that can potentially influence the stochastic properties of output.

This article reviews selected papers that use machine learning for economics research and policy analysis. Our review highlights when machine learning is used in economics, the commonly preferred models and how those models are used.