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The decline in safe real interest rates over the past three decades has reignited discussions on the neutral real interest rate, known as R*. We address the determinants and estimation methods of R*, as well as the factors influencing its decline and its future trajectory.

Explanations of changes in asset prices as being due to exogenous changes in risk appetite, although arguably controversial, have been popular in the financial community and have also received some attention in attempts to account for recent financial crises. Operational versions of these explanations are based on the assumption that changes in asset prices can be decomposed into a part that can be attributed to changes in riskiness and a part attributable to changes in risk aversion, and that some quantitative measure can capture these effects in isolation.

The federal government and the Bank of Canada have been committed for some time to achieving and maintaining price stability as a way to foster a rising standard of living for all Canadians. To support this objective, the inflation-control target range of 1 to 3 per cent was recently extended through to the end of 2001. By then, the government and the Bank plan to announce a long-run target for monetary policy. In this article, the authors provide an overview of the most recent empirical evidence on the benefits of lower inflation. They draw on an extensive earlier survey and on work presented at two recent conferences on price stability hosted by the Bank of Canada. They find that, when inflation and tax interactions are taken into account, there are large benefits to lowering inflation. When these benefits are compared with the transitional costs associated with lowering inflation, significant positive benefits remain. However, the authors note that the extension of the inflation-control targets to the end of 2001 allows further research to ensure an operational definition of price stability that will help Canadians achieve a high standard of living.

In the United States, the Federal Reserve has a dual mandate of promoting stable inflation and maximum employment. Since the Fed directly controls only one instrument - the federal funds rate - the authors argue that the Fed's priorities continuously alternate between inflation and economic activity.

When a bank holds a lot of safe assets, it is well situated to deal with funding stress. But when all banks hold a lot of safe assets, a pecuniary externality implies that their (wholesale) funding costs increase. This reduces banks’ ability to hold capital buffers and thus, paradoxically, increases the frequency of funding stress.

This paper provides an overview of digitalization and its economic implications. We assess the scope of digitalization in Canada as well as the challenges related to its measurement.

In this paper, we argue that differences in the cost structures across sectors play an important role in firms’ decisions to adjust their prices. We develop a menu-cost model of pricing in which retail firms intermediate trade between producers and consumers.

In his speech entitled “How People Think and How it Matters,” delivered to the Canadian Association for Business Economics, Deputy Governor Jean Boivin reviews various ways people form expectations and how these affect monetary policy.

The recent financial crisis has highlighted the importance of adverse selection as a contributing factor to financial market instability.