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This article examines recent research on the influence of various forms of economic uncertainty on the performance of different classes of monetary policy rules: from simple rules to fully optimal monetary policy under commitment. The authors explain why uncertainty matters in the design of monetary policy rules and provide quantitative examples from the recent literature. They also present results for several policy rules in ToTEM, the Bank of Canada's main model for projection and analysis, including rules that respond to price level, rather than to inflation.

We present a dynamic debt strategy model framework designed to assist sovereign debt portfolio managers in choosing an optimal debt issuance strategy. The main innovation of this framework is the introduction of dynamic issuance strategies, which allow issuance decisions to vary over time based on the model’s simulated state variables.

While demographic change has been an ongoing process in Canada, labour market implications of an aging population will become more acute in coming years. This article discusses the anticipated slowing in the growth of trend labour input over the coming decades with the aging of the baby boomers, declining fertility rates, and the stabilization of the labour force attachment of women. As the pool of labour shrinks, employers and governments will be looking for ways to address barriers to continued labour force participation and firms will have a greater incentive to find ways of improving labour productivity.

The authors examine the effect of a trade-off between shared credit risk and liquidity efficiency, among participants in Tranche 2 of the Large Value Transfer System (LVTS T2), on their decisions to leave open, or close, their bilateral credit limits (BCLs) to a participant at risk of imminent closure.

Monetary policy in the presence of nominal debt and labour supply heterogeneity creates a policy trade-off: a short-term economic stimulus leads to persistently reduced output over the medium term. Price-level targeting weakens this trade-off and is better able to stabilize inflation and output than inflation targeting.

Studies such as Lemmon, Roberts and Zender (2008) demonstrate how stable firms’ capital structures are over time, and raise the question of whether new theories of capital structure are needed to explain these phenomena.

The Reports section of the Financial System Review examines selected issues of relevance to the Canadian and global financial systems. The June 2015 issue features two reports summarizing recent work by Bank of Canada staff on specific financial sector policies.

Using identification-robust methods, the authors estimate and evaluate for Canada and the United States various classes of inflation equations based on generalized structural Calvo-type models. The models allow for different forms of frictions and vary in their assumptions regarding the type of price indexation adopted by firms.

The long-run relation between growth and inflation has not yet been studied in the context of nominal price and wage rigidities, despite the fact that these rigidities now figure prominently in workhorse macroeconomic models.

This report presents the details of a new semi-annual survey that will improve the Bank of Canada’s surveillance across the financial system and deepen efforts to engage with financial system participants. The survey collects expert opinions on the risks to and resilience of the Canadian financial system as well as on emerging trends and financial innovations. The report presents an overview of the survey and provides high-level results from the spring 2018 survey.