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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.

This is the fourth of the Financial Markets Department’s descriptions of Canadian financial industrial organization. The paper discusses the organization of the securities lending market in Canada. We outline key characteristics of securities lending contracts, participants in the securities lending market, the market infrastructures that support securities lending activities, and aggregated statistics describing the Canadian market.

The Bank of Canada has played an integral role in Canadian society for 70 years. When the Bank opened its doors in the spring of 1935, this country was struggling to define itself and to survive the economic and social turmoil of the Great Depression. Like Canada’s economy, its central bank has evolved and grown over the years. It has faced critical challenges and embraced change. But the Bank’s mandate has not changed. It is now, as it was then, to provide an effective, national monetary authority for Canada.

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.

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 shows that regional disparities in house price growth are more pronounced during house price busts than during booms. To explain this observation we construct a two-region currency union model incorporating a housing sector and extrapolative belief updating regarding house prices. To solve the model, we propose a new method that efficiently handles extrapolative belief updating in a wide class of structural models.

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.

We develop and estimate a search model in which identical consumers trade with price-setting firms that differ in productivity. We use the estimated model to characterize the qualitative and quantitative differences in prices and markups across firms. We explore how individual firms respond to changes in cost and demand and how they pass these through to their prices and markup.

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.

The increase in North American stock prices in 1999 and early 2000 has generated interest in the valuation assumptions that would make these price levels sustainable. Here, commonly used valuation techniques are applied to stock markets in Canada and the United States. For the comparative yield approach, real interest rates (rather than nominal rates) are preferred as the comparator of choice to yields on stock market indexes. The spreads between real interest rates and stock market yields have generally increased over the last two years. The dividend-discount model (DDM) approach provides an analytic linkage between the equity-risk premium and the expected growth of dividends. It suggests that market values (measured at the end of February 2000) could be sustained only by rapid growth of dividends in the future or by the continued assumption of an uncharacteristically low risk premium on equity. The spectacular rise in the value of technology stocks in 1999 is noted (Chart 4), and then the valuation measures for the Canadian stock market excluding the technology sector are examined. When this is done with the comparative yield approach, yield spreads are slightly lower, and for the DDM approach, one does not need to assume as high a growth of dividends or as low a risk premium to validate market valuations. Two effects of the "new economy" on the stock market are noted. One is the lowering of dividend yields, as new-economy technology companies tend to have a high reinvestment rate and a low dividend payout rate. Another relates to the potential for a higher track for the economy's productivity growth, which would mean that higher-than-historical assumptions about future earnings growth would be more plausible. Several explanations for the decline in risk premiums on equity are considered. While short-term volatility in the stock market has, if anything, increased in recent years, low inflation and improved economic performance, along with demographics and investor preferences, may have contributed to a decline in the risk premium demanded by investors. A scenario of rapid growth of dividends in the near term slowing to historical norms in the longer term is examined. While this approach can go partway towards explaining high stock market valuations, it requires assumptions that are outside historical experience.