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The Large Value Transfer System (LVTS) is Canada’s main electronic interbank funds transfer system that financial institutions use daily to transmit thousands of payments worth several billions of dollars.

I construct a weekly measure of real economic activity in Canada. Based on the work of Aruoba et al. (2009), the indicator is extracted as an unobserved component underlying the co-movement of four monthly observed real macroeconomic variables - employment, manufacturing sales, retail sales and GDP.

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."

Improving the conduct of monetary policy is unlikely to be the main motivation for central banks to issue a central bank digital currency (CBDC). While some argue that a CBDC could allow more complex transfer schemes or the ability to break below the zero lower bound, we find these benefits might be small or difficult to realize in practice.

Deputy Governor Agathe Côté discusses the inflation-targeting framework and issues the Bank is researching in the run-up to the renewal of the framework in 2016.

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.

The authors use simple new finite-sample methods to test the empirical relevance of the New Keynesian Phillips curve (NKPC) equation.

During and after the Great Recession of 2008–09, conventional monetary policy in the United States and many other advanced economies was constrained by the effective lower bound (ELB) on nominal interest rates. Several central banks implemented large-scale asset purchase (LSAP) programs, more commonly known as quantitative easing or QE, to provide additional monetary stimulus.

In this paper, the authors survey some of the recent techniques proposed in the literature to measure the trend component of output or potential output. Given the reported shortcomings of mechanical filters and univariate approaches to estimate potential output, the paper focusses on three simple multivariate methodologies: the multivariate Beveridge-Nelson methodology (MBN), Cochrane's methodology (CO), and the structural VAR methodology with long-run restrictions applied to output (LRRO).

The author reviews the theoretical and empirical literature to examine the traditional perception that the following trade-off exists between economic efficiency and stability in the banking system: a competitive banking system is more efficient and therefore important to growth, but market power is necessary for stability in the banking system.