Search

The Business Outlook Survey (BOS) has become an important part of monetary policy deliberations at the Bank of Canada and is also well known in Canadian policy and financial circles. This paper compiles more than 20 years of experience conducting the BOS and serves as a comprehensive reference manual.

Consumers, businesses and banks make millions of payments each day using a variety of instruments, such as debit cards, cheques and wires. Canada is currently developing three new systems to process these transactions: Lynx, Settlement Optimization Engine (SOE) and Real-Time Rail (RTR).

Investors who trade based on good research are said to be the backbone of stock markets: They conduct research to discover the value of stocks and, through their trading, guide financial prices to reflect true value. What can make their job difficult is that high-speed, short-term traders could use machine learning and other technologies to infer when informed investors are trading.

The Bank of Canada recently launched a quarterly survey to measure the expectations of Canadian households: the Canadian Survey of Consumer Expectations (CSCE). The data collected provide comprehensive information about consumer expectations for and uncertainty about inflation, the labour market and household finance. This article describes the CSCE and illustrates its potential to offer rich information about Canadian consumers for researchers and policy-makers.

We conduct a large-scale survey to shed light on what people believe about public finance. An experiment demonstrates that central bank communication can persistently shift views on monetary financing. It further suggests that views on monetary financing impact support for fiscal discipline.

We document the cyclical behavior of debt, equity, and retained earnings for different firm categories using firm-level Canadian data.

This paper proposes a class of linear signed rank statistics to test for a random walk with unknown drift in the presence of arbitrary forms of conditional heteroscedasticity.

This paper examines the impact of product market competition and corporate governance on the cost of debt financing and the use of bond covenants. We find that more anti-takeover provisions are associated with a lower cost of debt only in competitive industries.

Unusually large revisions to CPI-common in recent months stem from increased common movements across consumer price index components amid broad inflationary pressures. With recent revisions, CPI-common is more closely aligned with the Bank of Canada’s other two preferred measures of core inflation. However, caution is necessary when interpreting real-time estimates of CPI-common in the current environment.

Economists disagree about the factors driving the substantial increase in residual wage inequality in the United States over the past few decades. To identify changes in the returns to unobserved skills, we make a novel assumption about the dynamics of skills (especially among older workers) rather than about the stability of skill distributions across cohorts, as is standard.