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The recent strengh of the U.S. economy and historically low rates of inflation have sparked considerable debate among economists and Federal Reserve officials. In order to better explain the recent behaviour of inflation, some observers have raised the concept of a non-accelerating inflation capacity utilization rate (NAICU). In this study, the author presents a new […]

The household debt-to-disposable income ratio in Canada increased from 110 per cent in 1999 to 127 per cent in 2007. This increase has raised questions about the ability of households to service their increased debt if faced with a negative economic or socio-economic shock.

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.

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.

Innovations in communications and information technology and the related globalization of financial markets have created the potential for important changes to the structure of Canadian equity markets. Established marketplaces can now compete more effectively on an inter-regional and international basis. At the same time, reduced costs have lowered the barriers to entry faced by new competitors known as alternative trading systems (ATSs). In response to this heightened competition, established Canadian stock exchanges have taken measures to improve market quality. While regulators see innovation as positive for the development of Canadian markets, there is some concern that market liquidity may be fragmented in the short run. The Canadian Securities Administrators have proposed a framework that attempts to address this issue and that would allow ATSs to compete with traditional exchanges for the first time. The authors provide an overview of the Canadian equity market and its structure, focusing on these recent developments.

BoC-GEM, an adaptation of the Global Economy Model, initially developed at the International Monetary Fund and the New York Federal Reserve, is a very useful tool to tackle a broad range of issues pertinent to the current economic context, such as the recent movements in commodity prices and the adjustment of global imbalances. This article describes the structure and functioning of BoC-GEM and details some examples of recent application in the areas of monetary policy and issues in the real economy and questions of financial stability and describes ongoing research into introducing a financial sector into the model.

Dion examines the evolution of Canadian productivity since the mid-1990s, using the United States as a benchmark. During this period, trend productivity growth in Canada remained modest, whereas the U.S. witnessed a strong resurgence. Among the factors identified as potential root causes of Canada's lower productivity performance are a lower investment in information and communications technology, reallocation and adjustment costs associated with large relative price movements, and a weak demand for innovation.

The research findings highlighted in this article suggest that firm-size differences play a significant role in explaining the productivity gap between Canada and the United States. The authors review factors that lead to a positive relationship between productivity and size and then look at Canadian evidence of this relationship at the firm level. They quantify the extent to which the change in Canadian productivity as well as the Canada-U.S. productivity differences can be accounted for by the change in the importance of large firms and identify several factors that play a role in determining average firm size and aggregate productivity.

For several decades, the prices of services have been rising more rapidly than the prices of goods in Canada and the other major industrialized countries. In 2002, this gap between the growth rates of these two components of the consumer price index (CPI) widened considerably, leading researchers to ask if this was the beginning of a trend. Analysis reveals, however, that the gap is based on short-term dynamics and that it appears to be independent of the trend in the development of the overall price level. Evidence also shows that the gap is eventually reabsorbed. The authors examine a number of potential causes for the prices of services to rise faster than those of goods. These include the more rapid pace of productivity growth in the goods sector, the greater openness of goods to foreign trade, and stronger growth in the demand for services.

We construct a small-open-economy, New Keynesian dynamic stochastic general-equilibrium model with real-financial linkages to analyze the effects of financial shocks and macroprudential policies on the Canadian economy. Our model has four key features.