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Resource shares, defined as the fraction of total household spending going to each person in a household, are important for assessing individual material well-being, inequality and poverty. They are difficult to identify because consumption is measured typically at the household level, and many goods are jointly consumed, so that individual-level consumption in multi-person households is not directly observed.

This report reviews the Bank of Canada's oversight activities during 2013 and priorities for 2014 pursuant to the Payment Clearing and Settlement Act (PCSA). This annual report is intended to provide transparency and accountability regarding the Bank's activities in this area.

The collateral policy of central banks played a critical role during the recent financial crisis, as they worked to bolster liquidity and alleviate the funding pressures facing financial institutions. This article examines central bank collateral policy and discusses three areas in which central banks can use their collateral policy to influence financial market practices: promoting greater transparency for securitized products, improving practices related to credit risk, and reducing procyclicality in the management of market risk.

This note presents a structural vector autoregressive (SVAR) model of the global oil market. The model identifies four types of shocks with different economic interpretations: oil supply shocks, oil-market-specific demand shocks, storage demand shocks and shocks to global economic growth.

Using stock market data on banks, we show that the book value of loans recognizes losses with a delay. This delayed accounting is important for regulation because the requirements regulators impose are based on book values.

We expect that potential output growth will rebound from 1.4% in 2022 to 2.2% on average between 2023 and 2026. We revised down our estimates of growth over 2022–25 relative to the April 2022 assessment. The Canadian nominal neutral rate remains unchanged—in the range of 2% to 3%.

An economy with fixed amortization mortgages and borrowing-constrained consumers leads to the level of inflation targeted having real effects on home ownership, consumption, and debt. Using a life-cycle housing tenure choice model, we show that by front-loading real mortgage payments, higher inflation lowers steady-state home ownership and the mortgage-debt-to-income ratio.

This note summarizes the reassessment of potential output, conducted by the Bank of Canada for the April 2018 Monetary Policy Report. Overall, the profile for potential output growth is expected to remain flat at 1.8 per cent between 2018 and 2020 and 1.9 per cent in 2021.

When constrained by the zero lower bound, some central banks have communicated a threshold that must be met before short-term interest rates would be permitted to rise. Simulation results for Canada show that forward guidance that is conditional on achieving a price-level threshold can theoretically raise demand and inflation expectations by significantly more than unemployment thresholds. This superior performance is attributable to the fact that the price-level threshold depends on past inflation outcomes. In practice, however, history-dependent thresholds such as this might be more challenging for central banks to communicate.