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This note examines the relatively subdued pace of wage growth in Canada since the commodity price decline in 2014 and assesses whether the weakness is attributable to cyclical (e.g., labour market slack) or structural factors (e.g., resource reallocation and demographic change).

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.

We analyze the interaction between committed monetary policy and discretionary fiscal policy in a model with public debt, endogenous government expenditures, distortive taxation and nominal rigidities.

This issue of the Financial System Review reflects the Bank’s judgment that high household indebtedness and housing market imbalances remain the most important vulnerabilities. While these vulnerabilities remain elevated, policy measures continue to improve the resilience of the financial system. A third vulnerability highlighted in the FSR concerns cyber threats to an interconnected financial system.

Governor Tiff Macklem discusses how structural change—driven by U.S. protectionism, AI, and slowing population growth—is reshaping Canada’s economy. He outlines the Bank’s role in maintaining low and stable inflation while helping the economy through the transition.

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 report highlights how an effective resolution regime promotes financial stability. It does this by ensuring that financial market infrastructures (FMIs) would be able to continue to provide their critical functions during a period of stress when an FMI’s own recovery measures were failing. The report explains the Bank of Canada’s new role as the resolution authority for FMIs, which will further bolster financial system resilience.

A model of over-the-counter markets is proposed. Some asset buyers are informed in that they can identify high quality assets. Heterogeneous sellers with private information choose what type of buyers they want to trade with.

Firms that grow rapidly have the potential to usher in new innovations, products or processes (Kogan et al. 2017), become superstar firms (Haltiwanger et al. 2013) and impact the aggregate labour share (Autor et al. 2020; De Loecker et al. 2020). We explore the use of supervised machine learning techniques to identify a population of nascent high-growth firms using Canadian administrative firm-level data.

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.