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This paper examines the welfare cost of rare housing disasters characterized by large drops in house prices. I construct an overlapping generations general equilibrium model with recursive preferences and housing disaster shocks.

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 objective of this paper is to provide an empirical evaluation of the degree of shock asymmetry between eight European countries that would form the core of a monetary union. Given that the relevant measure is the degree of real shock asymmetry, our approach is to use the observed movement in real exchange rates as […]

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.

The financial crisis of 2007–09 has highlighted the importance of developments in financial conditions for real economic activity. The authors estimate the effect of current and past shocks to financial variables on U.S. GDP growth by constructing two growthbased financial conditions indexes (FCIs) that measure the contribution to quarterly (annualized) GDP growth from financial conditions.

We develop a model to explain a puzzling trend in cash demand in recent years: the value of bank notes in circulation as a percentage of GDP has remained stable despite decreasing cash usage at points of sale owing to competition from alternative means of payment such as credit cards.

This paper introduces new weighting schemes for model averaging when one is interested in combining discrete forecasts from competing Markov-switching models. In particular, we extend two existing classes of combination schemes – Bayesian (static) model averaging and dynamic model averaging – so as to explicitly reflect the objective of forecasting a discrete outcome.

This article examines the efforts of the major advanced countries to strengthen the international financial system in order to avoid financial crises such as those that occurred in emerging-market economies in the 1990s. These efforts have focused on crisis prevention and crisis management. The prevention of such crises has necessitated the formation of new international groups that include emerging markets in their membership. Measures have also been taken to reduce the vulnerability of countries to such crises. These measures have centered on the need for appropriate macroeconomic policies, including the need for sustainable exchange rate regimes, sound domestic financial systems, and prudent risk management. In the area of crisis management, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has been given access to additional resources for lending to countries that experience financial crises. The IMF has also established new lending facilities for use in such circumstances. It has also been agreed that the private sector will need to play a greater role in the management of such crises in the future.

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.

In this article the author examines the effects that major changes in energy prices in recent years have had on inflation and on the pace of economic expansion. These are then compared with the effects of the oil-price shocks that occurred in the 1970s and early 1980s. Changes in the intensity of energy use are examined, as well as developments in Canada's merchandise trade surplus in energy commodities and products. The author also considers the effects that a monetary policy anchored to low and stable inflation could have on price-setting behaviour and thus on the pass-through of higher energy costs to core inflation in Canada and in other industrial countries.