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In the year just ended, the global economy faced a number of exceptional challenges, reflecting a wide range of economic, financial, and geopolitical risks and uncertainties. These included the fallout from the September 2001 terrorist attacks, corporate accounting scandals, stock market volatility, and developments in the Middle East. Despite this global backdrop, the Canadian economy outperformed virtually all other industrial economies, growing by about 3 1/4 per cent and creating 560,000 jobs, while inflation expectations remained well anchored to the Bank of Canada’s 2 per cent inflation-control target.

This paper develops Monte Carlo likelihood-ratio tests for determining the number of regimes in Markov switching models. Unlike most existing procedures, which focus on testing one versus two regimes, the proposed methods allow testing an arbitrary number of regimes. They are valid in finite samples, robust to identification problems, and applicable to nonstationary, multivariate, and Markov switching GARCH models.

The Annual Report provides an account of the Bank’s management, activities and achievements in 2015; it includes the financial statements and a message from Governor Stephen S. Poloz.

Ian Foucher and Kyle Gray explain the different types of exchange-traded funds (ETFs), which present both benefits and risks for investors. They discuss ways in which the risk characteristics of certain ETF products could have broader implications for the financial system, and describe the evolution of ETF market structure and regulation in different jurisdictions as authorities try to mitigate risks related to ETFs.

This volume offers readers a behind-the-scenes look at the demanding world of bank note design, highlighting the beauty of Canada's bank notes and celebrating the engraver's art. Soft cover, 124 pages (2006).

We study the degree to which China’s 11th Five-Year Plan softens trade-offs between emissions and output. Our model suggests efficient regulation could have further increased aggregate productivity by 3.5% and output by 4.7% without any increase in aggregate emissions.

This report lays out elements of the Bank’s strategy related to climate change and details how the issue will be managed holistically across the organization, following the recommendations of the Financial Stability Board’s Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures.

We develop a heterogeneous firm macro model with private information and quantify the aggregate relevance of asymmetric information. We find that a spike in private information account for 40% of the decline in aggregate investment during the 2007-2009 financial crisis and made monetary stimulus significantly less effective.

We find that minority households see greater declines in housing returns and entries into homeownership than White households after a tightening of monetary policy. Our findings emphasize the unintended consequences of monetary policy on racial inequality in the housing market.

In times of high uncertainty, governments often implement interventions such as bailouts to financial institutions. To use public resources efficiently and to avoid major spillovers to the rest of the economy, policy-makers try to identify which institutions should receive assistance.