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Inflation expectations are a key determinant of actual and future inflation and thus matter for the conduct of monetary policy. We study how firms form their inflation expectations using quarterly firm-level data from the Bank of Canada’s Business Outlook Survey, spanning the 2001 to 2015 period.

Real rigidities that limit the responsiveness of real marginal cost to output are a key ingredient of sticky price models necessary to account for the dynamics of output and inflation. We argue here, in the spirit of Bils and Kahn (2000), that the behavior of marginal cost over the cycle is directly related to that of inventories, data on which is readily available.

This paper examines the relationship between the term structure of interest rates and future changes in inflation for Canada using a newly constructed par-value yield series. The main conclusion of the empirical work is that the slope of the nominal term structure from 1- to 5-year maturities is a reasonably good predictor of future changes in inflation over these horizons.

The authors examine how the valuation multiples assigned to the equity of Canadian-listed firms compare with the equity of comparable firms listed in the United States. They find that Canadian-listed firms trade at a discount to U.S.-listed firms across a range of valuation measures.

The effective conduct of monetary policy is complicated by uncertainty about the level of potential output, and thus about the size of the monetary policy response that would be sufficient to achieve the targeted inflation rate. One possible response to such uncertainty is for the monetary authority to "probe," interpreted here as actively using its policy response to learn about the level of potential output.

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Decimalization in Great Britain

The Victorian florin on the cover is part of the National Currency Collection of the Bank of Canada.

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused an atypical recession in which some sectors of the economy boomed and others collapsed. This required a unique fiscal policy reaction to both support firms and stimulate activity in sectors with slack. Was fiscal policy able to get where it was needed? Mostly, yes.

Japanese economic activity has been stagnant since the collapse of the speculative asset-price bubble in 1990, despite highly expansionary monetary policy which has brought interest rates down to record low levels. Although several reasons have been put forward to explain the sustained weakness of the Japanese economy, none is more intriguing from the viewpoint of a central bank than the possibility that monetary policy had been largely ineffective because the Japanese economy entered a Keynesian "liquidity trap."

The Latin American debt crises in the 1980s and the Asian crisis in the late 1990s both provided impetus for reforming the framework for restructuring sovereign debt. In the late 1980s, the Brady plan established the importance of substantive debt relief in addressing some crises.

Allen and Engert report on recent research at the Bank of Canada on various aspects of efficiency in the Canadian banking industry. This research suggests that, overall, Canadian banks appear to be relatively efficient producers of financial services and they do not exercise monopoly or collusive-oligopoly power. The authors note the value of continuing to investigate opportunities to improve efficiency and competition in financial services in Canada.