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After a period with the interest rate at the effective lower bound, temporarily overshooting inflation may offer important economic benefits. This may be especially true for vulnerable segments of the population, such as workers with low attachment to the labour force and the long-term unemployed.

The number of job gains and losses across firms in Canada each year is roughly one-fifth the total number of jobs and generally occurs within sectors (industries) rather than across sectors. Since labour reallocation within sectors has been strongly related to productivity growth in Canada, defining the key drivers of this type of reallocation is important, given the higher rates of reallocation and productivity growth in the Untied States than in Canada. This article finds that the appreciation of the Canadian dollar and rising commodity prices led to above-average reallocation of labour across sectors over the 2005-08 period, but that the impact on productivity has been minor. Labour reallocation across firms, however, generates substantial labour productivity gains in manufacturing and the business sector as a whole.

Examining the incentives for banks to hold various assets on their balance sheets for use as collateral when the opportunity cost of doing so can be high; an outline of the complexity inherent in any modern risk-management system and review of possible strategies to improve the performance of risk management; causes and consequences of the changing pace of labour reallocation in Canada; description of the structure and functioning of BoC-GEM— an adaptation of the Global Economy Model— with examples of its recent application.

In this article, we consider central bank intervention to address financial market turmoil with a focus on the questions of why, when, and how a central bank might intervene. We set out a policy framework and identify appropriate central bank instruments to respond to extraordinary financial market turmoil, consistent with central bank policy goals and functions.

Since 2014, the Bank of Canada (BoC) has maintained a comprehensive database of sovereign defaults to systematically measure and aggregate the nominal value of the different types of sovereign government debt in default. The database is posted on the BoC’s website and is updated annually in partnership with the Bank of England (BoE).

Advances in variance analysis permit the splitting of the total quadratic variation of a jump diffusion process into upside and downside components. Recent studies establish that this decomposition enhances volatility predictions, and highlight the upside/downside variance spread as a driver of the asymmetry in stock price distributions.

Deputy Governor Rhys Mendes discusses how monetary policy worked to bring inflation back down to target and why the Bank wants inflation to stay close to 2%.

During the recent financial crisis, one of the forces set in motion by the initial losses on subprime-mortgage loans was a significant decline in the market liquidity of assets and in the ability of financial institutions to obtain funding in wholesale markets. In this article, the authors summarize recent research that clarifies the role of liquidity in destabilizing the financial system and examine the implications of this research for the recently announced financial system reforms, including Basel III.

One argument for central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) is that without them, private and foreign digital monies could displace domestic currencies, threatening the central bank’s monetary policy and lender of last resort capabilities. I revisit this monetary sovereignty rationale and offer a wider view—one that considers a broader set of currency functions and captures important cross-country variation.