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Market power and pass-through of cost and demand shocks are studied in a market with free entry of heterogeneous firms and consumer mixed search. Equilibrium prices and markups are driven by variation in the elasticity of demand across firms. Improved conditions for buyers can either raise or lower market power.

We develop a model in which a financial intermediary’s investment in risky assets—risk taking—is excessive due to limited liability and deposit insurance and characterize the policy tools that implement efficient risk taking.

Senior Deputy Governor Carolyn Rogers looks at the mortgage market in Canada—past, present and future.

Senior Deputy Governor Wilkins discusses economic developments since the July Monetary Policy Report and Governing Council’s deliberations leading to yesterday’s policy rate decision.

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.

Over this period, there has been a fundamental transformation in the way monetary policy is conducted in Canada and in most other industrial countries. While globalization and technological change have played an important role in this area, as in so many others, they have not, to my mind, been the principal driving force behind this transformation. Far more important has been the interaction of experience and economic theory.

We find the top 10% of the income distribution accounts for three-quarters of the gap in GDP per adult between Canada and the United States. The large gaps in income for high-income earners help distinguish between alternative explanations of this persistent gap in GDP per adult.

In 2023, the share of Canadian banks’ foreign assets and liabilities amounted to around 50%. While Canadian banks engage domestically mostly with households and non-financial corporations, their most common counterparties abroad are non-bank financial institutions.

In a recent speech, Deputy Governor Sheryl Kennedy discusses how the efficiency of Canada's capital markets compares in a global context. Taking into account the three inter-related aspects of an efficient market (allocational, operational, and informational efficiency), Kennedy reviews the recent performance of Canadian capital markets under such headings as size, completeness, and access to capital and the instruments needed to hedge, or distribute, risk (allocational efficiency). To assess operational efficiency, she considers Canadian markets' liquidity and whether their transactional costs are competitive. Finally, she reviews transparency and market integrity (and how integrity is maintained) to determine markets' informational efficiency. She also offers several suggestions as to how Canadian markets can continue to be improve and maintain their competitiveness.

This note presents our estimates of potential output growth for the global economy through 2020. Overall, we expect global potential output growth to remain broadly stable over the projection horizon, averaging 3.3 per cent, although there is considerable uncertainty surrounding these estimates.