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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.

The industry standard for seasonally adjusting data, X-13ARIMA-SEATS, is not suitable for high-frequency data. We summarize and assess several of the most popular seasonal adjustment methods for weekly data given the increased availability and promise of non-traditional data at higher frequencies.

The Bank of Canada's version of the Global Economy Model (BoC-GEM) is derived from the model created at the International Monetary Fund by Douglas Laxton (IMF) and Paolo Pesenti (Federal Reserve Bank of New York and National Bureau of Economic Research).

What are the effects of financial market imperfections on unemployment and vacancies? Since standard DSGE models do not typically model unemployment, they abstract from this issue.

This paper examines the macroeconomic implications of rising government debt in Canada and the short-run costs and long-run benefits of stemming the rise. The discussion begins with an evaluation of the long-run consequences of increasing government indebtedness, first based on the simple arithmetic of the government's long-run budget constraint, and then based on simulations of […]

The author proposes and evaluates econometric models that try to explain and forecast real quarterly housing expenditures in Canada. Structural and leading-indicator models of the Canadian housing sector are described.

This paper reviews the range of extraordinary programs launched by the Bank of Canada in response to the pandemic-related financial market disruption. It provides some recommendations for future interventions to ensure the programs are appropriately structured for the financial and economic stresses they are intended to address.

An effective exchange rate is a measure of the value of a country's currency vis-à-vis the currencies of its most important trading partners. The Bank of Canada has created a new Canadian-dollar effective exchange rate index (CERI) to replace the C-6 index that it currently uses. The CERI uses multilateral trade weights published by the International Monetary Fund and includes the six currencies of countries or economic zones with the largest share of Canada's international trade. As such, it better reflects the recent changes in Canada's trade profile, including the rise in the importance of China and Mexico and the relative decline in importance of Europe and Japan in Canada's international trade. The author describes the methodology and construction of the new index and reviews the advantages it offers over the C-6, particularly the use of multilateral trade weights, the inclusion of trade in services, and the use of more recent trade data.

The consumer price index (CPI) is the most commonly used measure to track changes in the overall level of prices. Since it departs from a true cost-of-living index, the CPI is subject to four types of measurement bias—commodity substitution, outlet substitution, new goods and quality adjustment. The author updates previous Bank of Canada estimates of measurement bias in the Canadian CPI by examining these four sources of potential bias. He finds the total measurement bias over the 2005–11 period to be about 0.5 percentage point per year, consistent with the Bank’s earlier findings. Slightly more than half of this bias is caused by the fixed nature of the CPI basket of goods and services.

This article reviews and examines some of the main explanations for the slow growth that many advanced economies continue to experience seven years after the 2007–09 global financial crisis. Does this muted recovery reflect just a prolonged cycle in the aftermath of a financial crisis? Is it due to a structural inadequacy of demand leading to a long-lasting liquidity trap? Or is it largely supply side in nature, reflecting demographic and technological factors?