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In the 1970s and 1980s we found - in common with many other countries - that high and variable rates of inflation created a lot of economic damage. And it took a long time and a lot of work with various monetary policy frameworks before we got back on track.

Using detailed loan transactions-level data we examine the efficiency of an overnight interbank lending market, and the bargaining power of its participants. Our analysis relies on the equilibrium concept of the core, which imposes a set of no-arbitrage conditions on trades in the market.

This paper shows that banks that rely heavily on short-term funding engage less in maturity transformation in an attempt to decrease their exposure to rollover risk. These banks shorten both the maturity of their portfolio of loans as well as the maturity of newly issued loans. We find that the loan yield curve becomes steeper with banks’ increasing use of short-term funding.

We evaluate different approaches for using monthly indicators to predict Chinese GDP for the current and the next quarter (‘nowcasts’ and ‘forecasts’, respectively). We use three types of mixed-frequency models, one based on an economic activity indicator (Liu et al., 2007), one based on averaging over indicator models (Stock and Watson, 2004), and a static factor model (Stock and Watson, 2002).

This paper develops and estimates a dynamic general equilibrium model that realistically accounts for an input-output linkage between firms operating at different stages of processing. Firms face technological change which is specific to their processing stage and charge new prices according to stage-specific Calvo-probabilities.

While central banks cannot provide complete foresight with respect to their future policy actions, it is in the interests of both central banks and market participants that central banks be transparent about their reaction functions and how they may evolve in response to economic developments, shocks, and risks to their outlooks.

We develop a model with firm heterogeneity in importing and cross-border shopping among consumers. Exchange-rate appreciations lower the cost of imported goods, but also lead to more cross-border shopping; hence, the net impact on aggregate retail prices and sales is ambiguous.

Stress testing is an important tool used by financial authorities and entities around the world to evaluate potential risks to the financial system. Kartik Anand, Guillaume Bédard-Pagé and Virginie Traclet discuss different stress-testing approaches, with emphasis on the innovative and analytically rigorous model developed by the Bank of Canada: the MacroFinancial Risk Assessment Framework (MFRAF). They also present the stress-test results obtained in the context of the 2013 Canada Financial Sector Assessment Program led by the International Monetary Fund, including the important contributions made by the use of MFRAF in the exercise.

The Terms-of-Trade Economic Model, or ToTEM, replaced the Quarterly Projection Model (QPM) in December 2005 as the Bank's principal projection and policy-analysis model for the Canadian economy. Benefiting from advances in economic modelling and computer power, ToTEM builds on the strengths of QPM, allowing for optimizing behaviour on the part of firms and households, both in and out of steady state, in a multi-product environment. The authors explain the motivation behind the development of ToTEM, provide an overview of the model and its calibration, and present several simulations to illustrate its key properties, concluding with some indications of how the model is expected to evolve going forward.

Product standards are omnipresent in industrialized societies. Though standardization can be beneficial for domestic producers, divergent product standards have been categorized as a major obstacle to international trade. This paper quantifies the effect of standard harmonization on trade flows and characterizes the extent to which it changes the cost and demand structure of exporting.