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Economic activities typically involve coordination among a large number of agents. These agents have to anticipate what other agents think before making their own decisions.

Since the Bank of Canada adopted inflation targeting in 1991, it has focused on a measure of core inflation as a shorter-term guide for monetary policy. When the targets were renewed in 2001, the Bank adopted CPIX as its measure of core inflation because of the advantages it offered. Leflèche and Armour review the experience with CPIX and whether the criteria used to select it in 2001 still favour the measure today. They describe the various measures of core inflation monitored by the Bank and evaluate them on the basis of the volatility of the components, the volatility of the core measures themselves, absence of bias relative to total CPI, predictive power, and certain practical criteria, including timeliness and credibility. They conclude that CPIX still satisfies all the empirical and practical criteria.

Existing home sales’ share of Canada’s economic pie has been rising in recent years, and variation around this trend has resulted in outsized contributions to changes in real gross domestic product (GDP). In this context, we use a cointegration framework to estimate the level of resale activity across the Canadian provinces that is supported by fundamentals—namely, full-time employment, housing affordability and migration flows—to help look through the volatility.

BIS interbank lending data show that the Great Recession generated large and persistent changes in the international interbank lending positions of various countries. The main objective of this study is to understand the role of changes in international interbank credit flows in transmitting shocks across borders.

Canada’s financial system is resilient. Overall, households, businesses, banks and non-bank financial intermediaries successfully weathered the pandemic, a period of elevated inflation, and sharp increases in interest rates. But the trade war currently threatens the Canadian economy and poses risks to financial stability.

The Canadian economy is currently in transition from a period of disinflation to one with a very low and relatively stable inflation rate. Against this background, the author asks whether reduced-form parameters should be expected to be invariant to changes in the inflation process. This raises two empirical issues. The first relates to whether shifts […]

This volume explores money and the role it has played, and continues to play, in society, through the lens of Canada's National Currency Collection. The Collection is an extraordinary repository of coins, bank notes, and related paraphernalia from around the world. Soft cover, 124 pages (2008).

Using a general equilibrium model with nominal rigidities and financial frictions, we explore whether introducing a central bank digital currency (CBDC) affects the transmission of monetary policy, and how the effects depend on CBDC design features. We also study whether paying interest on central bank liabilities is contractionary or expansionary.

Risk assessment models are an important component of the Bank’s analytical tool kit for assessing the resilience of the financial system. We describe the Framework for Risk Identification and Assessment (FRIDA), a suite of models developed at the Bank of Canada to quantify the impact of financial stability risks to the broader economy and a range of financial system participants (households, businesses and banks).

In this article, the author reviews the factors behind the recent evolution of liquidity in the market for Government of Canada (GoC) securities. He finds that liquidity has been supported by changes in the structure of the market, notably the introduction and increasing size of benchmark bond issues. He also notes that while the GoC bond market has generally benefited from changes in market structure, liquidity in the treasury bill market has decreased since the mid-1990s, largely because of the declining supply of these securities. This article also presents some comparisons of liquidity in the government securities markets of other industrialized countries and finds that liquidity in the Canadian market appears to compare favourably with all but the large U.S. Treasury market.