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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.

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.

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.

Can Bitcoin survive? Some say it will become vulnerable to attacks as the rewards for processing Bitcoin transactions continue to decline. The economics of fixed costs suggest the specialized hardware used to mine Bitcoin may be key to its survival.

The financial system makes an important contribution to the welfare of all Canadians. The ability of households and firms to confidently hold and transfer financial assets is one of the fundamental building blocks of the Canadian economy.

We explain how the Bank of Canada’s policy models capture the trade-off between output and inflation in Canada. We provide new estimates of the trade-off and contrast them with those in the Bank’s macroeconomic models.

This paper studies the implications of model uncertainty for wealth distribution in a tractable general equilibrium model with a borrowing constraint and robustness à la Hansen and Sargent (2008). Households confront model uncertainty about the process driving the return of the risky asset, and they choose robust policies.

I chose to speak about globalization at the outset of my tenure because it will continue to be one of the forces shaping our economy and economic policy for years to come. Steady advances in transportation, communication, and information technologies, underpinned by the more widespread adoption of free-market economic policies, are shrinking the globe and expanding the global economy.

We use a new real-time database for Canada to study various output gap measures. This includes recently developed measures based on models incorporating many variables as inputs (and therefore requiring real-time data for many variables).

This paper outlines and assesses the various channels through which digitalization can affect prices of goods and services.