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This paper examines the contribution of several supply factors to US headline inflation since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. We identify six supply shocks using a structural VAR model: labor supply, labor productivity, global supply chain, oil price, price mark-up and wage mark-up shocks.

Feedback rules are rules aimed at guiding policy-makers as they face the problem of keeping inflation close to a desired path without causing variability elsewhere in the economy. These rules link short-term interest rates, controlled by the central bank, to the rate of inflation and/or its deviation from a target rate. The authors describe the most popular types of feedback rules and review some simulation results.

We explore how many electronic funds transfer (EFT) systems can viably coexist within a jurisdiction at efficient scale by estimating the cost curve of the average EFT. We estimate the marginal cost to be approximately $0.55 per transaction, and the fixed cost to be approximately $83 million per year.

There are indications that business dynamism has declined in advanced economies. In particular, firm entry and exit rates have fallen, suggesting that the creative destruction process has lost some of its vitality. Meanwhile, productivity growth has slowed. Some believe that lower entry and exit rates partly explain the weaker productivity growth.

Growth has slowed in many emerging-market economies (EMEs) since the 2007–09 global financial crisis, reflecting both cyclical and structural factors. In this context, it will be in-creasingly important for EMEs to raise potential growth by maintaining steady progress on structural reforms. How do structural reforms generally support growth? What are the re-form priorities for EMEs over recent history and today? Finally, what will be the impact of planned structural reforms on potential output growth among the world’s larger EMEs? These are some of the questions considered by the authors.

This article by the Bank's Web master details the development of the Bank's Web site and highlights some of its special features. It includes a description of dataBANK, a custom-built interface to the Bank's economic databases that gives visitors access to 220 data series. It also provides a mini tour of monetary policy material "on site," as well as a taste of things to come. Above all, this article invites you to come and visit our site.

Bank of Canada liquidity actions in response to the financial market turmoil; understanding corporate bond spreads using credit default swaps; review of the conflicts of interest between participants in the securitization process highlighting the most recent policy measures and potential solutions for ameliorating these agency issues.

This article describes experimental economics, in general, and new developments in experimental macroeconomics, in particular. The approach has a clear niche in providing evidence on economic phenomena that cannot be observed directly or that are difficult to measure. Experimental work conducted by Bank of Canada economists has shed light on a number of issues important to monetary policy, such as the relative efficacy between price-level and inflation targeting, and the nature of inflation expectations formation.

We review the nascent but fast-growing literature on central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), focusing on their potential impacts on private banks. We evaluate these impacts in three areas of traditional banking: payments, lending and liquidity and maturity transformation. We also take a broader look at CBDCs and highlight two promising directions for future research.