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This paper surveys recent developments in the theoretical and empirical literature on the economic implications of uncertainty about the longer-term outlook for inflation. In particular, the linkages between inflation, long-run inflation uncertainty, and aggregate economic activity in industrial economies have become considerably better understood during the past decade.

We measure consumers’ use of cash by harmonizing payment diary surveys from seven countries. The seven diary surveys were conducted in 2009 (Canada), 2010 (Australia), 2011 (Austria, France, Germany and the Netherlands), and 2012 (the United States).

We propose a drifting-coefficient model to empirically study the effect of money on output growth in Canada and to examine the role of prevailing financial conditions for that relationship. We show that such a time-varying approach can be a useful way of modelling the impact of money on growth, and can partly reconcile the lack of concensus in the literature on the question of whether money affects growth.

This note examines the merits of monetary policy adjustments in response to financial stability concerns, taking into account changes in the state of knowledge since the renewal of the inflation-targeting agreement in 2011. A key financial system vulnerability in Canada is elevated household indebtedness: as more and more households are nearing their debt-capacity limits, the likelihood and severity of a large negative correction in housing markets are also increasing.

This paper surveys the literature on the zero bound on the nominal interest rate. It addresses questions ranging from the conditions under which the zero bound on the nominal interest rate might occur to policy options to avoid or use to exit from such a situation. We discuss literature that examines historical and country evidence, and literature that uses models to generate evidence on this question.

The authors examine the Bank of Canada's overnight rate as a measure of monetary policy in vector autoregression (VAR) models. Since the time series of the Bank's current measure of the overnight rate begins only in 1971, the authors splice it to day loan rate observations to obtain a sufficiently long period of data.

The authors evaluate whether an assortment of simple rules could improve how the Bank of Canada implements its inflation-targeting monetary policy. They focus on measuring the correlation between the deviations of inflation from the target and the lagged deviations of rule recommendations from the actual policy interest rate.

Pricing-to-market (PTM) theory suggests that monopolistic firms which export adjust their destination-specific markups in reaction to exchange rate shocks. These adjustments limit changes in the price of their exports.

Model risk is a constant danger for financial economists using interest-rate forecasts for the purposes of monetary policy analysis, portfolio allocations, or risk-management decisions. Use of multiple models does not necessarily solve the problem as it greatly increases the work required and still leaves the question "which model forecast should one use?"

In this paper, the author describes reduced-form linear and non-linear econometric models developed to forecast and analyze quarterly data on output growth in the Canadian manufacturing sector from 1981 to 2003.