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We study the cross-section of equilibrium returns on safe assets using a tractable asset pricing model with a micro-founded demand for liquidity and multiple safe assets with heterogeneous transaction costs. We test the main predictions of our theory using a novel measure of relative (in)convenience yields in the US Treasury market.

Canada’s financial system is resilient. Overall, households, businesses, banks and non-bank financial intermediaries successfully weathered the pandemic, a period of elevated inflation, and sharp increases in interest rates. But the trade war currently threatens the Canadian economy and poses risks to financial stability.

We study how the distribution of information supply by the news media affects the macroeconomy. We find that media coverage focuses particularly on the largest firms, and that firms’ equity financing and investment increase after media coverage. But these equity and investment responses are largest among small, rarely covered firms. Our quantitative studies highlight that the aggregate effects of media coverage depend crucially on how that coverage is allocated.

Since the Bank of Canada adopted inflation targeting in 1991, it has focused on a measure of core inflation as a shorter-term guide for monetary policy. When the targets were renewed in 2001, the Bank adopted CPIX as its measure of core inflation because of the advantages it offered. Leflèche and Armour review the experience with CPIX and whether the criteria used to select it in 2001 still favour the measure today. They describe the various measures of core inflation monitored by the Bank and evaluate them on the basis of the volatility of the components, the volatility of the core measures themselves, absence of bias relative to total CPI, predictive power, and certain practical criteria, including timeliness and credibility. They conclude that CPIX still satisfies all the empirical and practical criteria.

In this article, the author reviews the factors behind the recent evolution of liquidity in the market for Government of Canada (GoC) securities. He finds that liquidity has been supported by changes in the structure of the market, notably the introduction and increasing size of benchmark bond issues. He also notes that while the GoC bond market has generally benefited from changes in market structure, liquidity in the treasury bill market has decreased since the mid-1990s, largely because of the declining supply of these securities. This article also presents some comparisons of liquidity in the government securities markets of other industrialized countries and finds that liquidity in the Canadian market appears to compare favourably with all but the large U.S. Treasury market.

Economic activities typically involve coordination among a large number of agents. These agents have to anticipate what other agents think before making their own decisions.

This analytical paper examines the organization of Government of Canada bond dealing. We focus on dealers’ hedging and funding practices, the market infrastructures that support those practices, and trading costs across the yield curve. This paper builds on earlier work discussing Canada’s fixed-income market: "Government of Canada Fixed-Income Market Ecology."

The Bank of Canada made changes to several of the tools that make up its framework for operations and liquidity provision. These changes came about after a comprehensive re-view of the framework and are designed to help the Bank better achieve its objectives of reinforcing the target for the overnight rate and supporting the well-functioning of Cana-dian financial markets under normal market conditions.

There has recently been considerable discussion about the ability of inflation to facilitate the adjustment of prices and wages and thus enhance economic performance. The discussion centres on whether wages are downwardly rigid. Wages are said to be downwardly rigid if it is difficult for the wages of some workers to fall despite underlying supply and demand pressures for decreases. Some authors have suggested that if downward nominal wage rigidity is prevalent it would be desirable to select a positive rate of inflation as the target for monetary policy. In this article, the authors evaluate the wage-rigidity hypothesis. They first examine the empirical evidence to assess whether the degree of downward rigidity is significant in Canada. They then analyze some key assumptions of the wage-rigidity hypothesis and its implications for employment. They also look at the empirical evidence on whether the combination of downward wage rigidity and low inflation has reduced employment.

Risk assessment models are an important component of the Bank’s analytical tool kit for assessing the resilience of the financial system. We describe the Framework for Risk Identification and Assessment (FRIDA), a suite of models developed at the Bank of Canada to quantify the impact of financial stability risks to the broader economy and a range of financial system participants (households, businesses and banks).