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In this report, the authors examine and compare twelve private and public sector models of the Canadian economy with respect to their paradigm, structure, and dynamic properties. These open-economy models can be grouped into two economic paradigms.

Oil prices have declined sharply over the past three years. While both supply and demand factors played a role in the large oil price decline of 2014, global supply growth seems to have been the predominant force. The most important drivers were likely the surprising growth of US shale oil production, the output decisions of the Organization of the Petro-leum Exporting Countries and the weaker-than-expected global growth that followed the 2009 global financial crisis.

We provide an updated evaluation of the value of various measures of core inflation that could be used in the conduct of monetary policy. We find that the Bank of Canada’s current preferred measures of core inflation—CPI-trim, CPI-median and CPI-common—continue to outperform alternative core measures across a range of criteria.

Deputy Governor Sylvain Leduc discusses how upgrading Canada’s core payment systems will contribute to financial stability and help the Bank keep inflation on target.

We propose a range of benchmarks for assessing labour market strength for monetary policy. This work builds on a previous framework that considers how diverse and segmented the labour market is. We apply these benchmarks to the Canadian labour market and find that it has more than recovered from the COVID-19 shock.

In this note, we find that market participants react to an unexpected change in the tone of Canadian monetary policy statements. When the market perceives that the Bank of Canada plans to tighten (or alternatively, loosen) the monetary policy earlier than previously expected, the Canadian dollar appreciates (or depreciates) and long-term Government of Canada bond yields increase (or decrease). The tone of a statement is particularly relevant to the market when the policy rate has been unchanged for some time.

I study how banking market concentration and reliance on wholesale funding affect monetary policy transmission to mortgage rates. I find that this transmission is imperfect and dampens the response of consumption, output, and housing prices.

Work on testing for bubbles has caused much debate, much of which has focussed on methodology. Monte Carlo simulations reported in Evans (1991) showed that standard tests for unit roots and cointegration frequently reject the presence of bubbles even when such bubbles are present by construction. Evans referred to this problem as the pitfall of testing for bubbles.

According to the rent-extraction hypothesis, weak corporate governance allows entrenched CEOs to capture the pay-setting process and benefit from events outside of their control – get paid for luck.

Mutual funds employ a host of tools to manage redemption run risk. However, our results suggest that Canadian corporate bond funds may be vulnerable to redemption runs, especially when they are less liquid and when market volatility is high.