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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.

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.

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.

This paper shows point identification in first-price auction models with risk aversion and unobserved auction heterogeneity by exploiting multiple bids from each auction and variation in the number of bidders. The required exclusion restriction is shown to be consistent with a large class of entry models.

We investigate the unintended consequences of the Home Affordable Refinance Program (HARP). Originally designed to help borrowers refinance after the 2008–09 global financial crisis, HARP inadvertently strengthened the market power of incumbent lenders by creating a cost advantage for them. Despite a 2013 policy rectifying this cost advantage, we still find significant welfare losses for borrowers.

We present a novel database of real-time data and forecasts from the Bank of Canada’s staff economic projections. We then provide a forecast evaluation for GDP growth and CPI inflation since 1982: we compare the staff forecasts with those from commonly used time-series models estimated with real-time data and with forecasts from other professional forecasters and provide standard bias tests.

We explore the consumer value proposition of a hypothetical Digital Canadian Dollar, adoption considerations and the users who would benefit most from this potential new payment method. We employ a design-thinking consultation methodology, allowing participants to interact with research prototypes of increasing complexity to reveal user preferences, constraints and adoption influences.

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.

The literature highlights that labour market churn, including job-to-job transitions, is a key element of wage growth. Using microdata from the Labour Force Survey, we compute measures of labour market churn and compare these with pre-crisis averages to assess implications for wage growth.

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.