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Understanding the factors that determine the migration of labour between regions is crucial for assessing the economy’s response to macroeconomic shocks and identifying policies that will encourage an efficient reallocation of labour. By examining the determinants of migration within Canada from 1991 to 2006, this article provides evidence that regional differences in employment rates and household incomes tend to increase labour migration, and that provincial borders and language differences are barriers to migration.

This paper presents two complementary approaches to estimating the appropriate quantity of settlement balances needed to effectively operate monetary policy under a floor system in Canada.

Model-based forecasts of important economic variables are part of the range of information considered for monetary policy decision making.

The financial crisis of 2007-09 and the subsequent extended period of historically low real interest rates have revived the question of whether economic agents are willing to take on more risk when interest rates remain low for a prolonged time period. This increased appetite for risk, which causes economic agents to search for investment assets and strategies that generate higher investment returns, has been called the risk-taking channel of monetary policy. Recent academic research on banks suggests that lending policies in times of low interest rates can be consistent with the existence of a risk-taking channel of monetary policy in Europe, South America, the United States and Canada. Specifically, studies find that the terms of loans to risky borrowers become less stringent in periods of low interest rates. This risk-taking channel may amplify the effects of traditional transmission mechanisms, resulting in the creation of excessive credit.

The MacroFinancial Risk Assessment Framework (MFRAF) models the interconnections between liquidity and solvency in a financial system, with multiple institutions linked through an interbank network. The MFRAF integrates funding liquidity risk as an endogenous outcome of the interactions between solvency risk and the liquidity profiles of banks, which is a complementary approach to the new […]

Our paper employs smartphone data to construct an improved cash access metric by accounting for both spatial agglomeration and households’ travel patterns. We find that incorporating trip-chaining into the travel metric could show that travel costs are from 15 to 25% less than not incorporating trip-chaining and that the biggest decrease is driven by rural residents.

This paper studies how unsecured consumer credit impacts the extent to which unemployment insurance (UI) policies smooth aggregate consumption fluctuations over the business cycle. Using a general equilibrium real business cycle model, I find that unsecured credit amplifies the extent to which UI smooths cyclical consumption fluctuations.

The third strategy employed by the Bank when dealing with uncertainty is the consideration of appropriate simple reaction functions or "rules" for the setting of the policy interest rate. Since John Taylor's presentation of his much-discussed rule, research on simple policy rules has exploded. Simple rules have several advantages. In particular, they are easy to construct and communicate and are believed by some to be robust, in the sense of generating good results in a variety of economic models. This article provides an overview of the recent research regarding the usefulness and robustness of simple monetary policy rules, particularly in models of the Canadian economy. It also describes and explains the role of simple rules in the conduct of monetary policy in Canada.

This discussion paper represents the work of the inter-agency Canadian OTC Derivatives Working Group (OTCD WG), formed in December 2009, that is chaired by the Bank of Canada and composed of members from the Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions (OSFI), the federal Department of Finance, the Ontario Securities Commission, the Autorité des marchés financiers, the Alberta Securities Commission and the Bank of Canada.

Governor Tiff Macklem talks about the COVID-19 pandemic and major economic forces are affecting the labour market, and the need for all groups to benefits from the recovery.