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Using almost two decades of detailed high-frequency data, we show how Canadian interest rates, the CAD/USD spot exchange rate, and stock market returns react to both US and domestic macro announcements. We find that Canadian macroeconomic announcements invoke greater responses in short-term yields, whereas US macroeconomic announcements play an increasingly important role in the yield movements of longer-term assets.

The primary focus of this paper is to study conflict of interest in the brokerage market. Brokers face a conflict of interest when the commissions they receive from investors differ from the costs imposed by different trading venues.

Deputy Governor Paul Beaudry discusses the benefits of being near the Bank’s 2% inflation target and the dangers of straying from it for too long.

This paper provides an extensive evaluation of the performance of quantile vector autoregression (QVAR) to forecast macroeconomic risk. Generally, QVAR outperforms standard benchmark models. Moreover, QVAR and QVAR augmented with factors perform equally well. Both are adequate for modeling macroeconomic risks.

A series of major international financial crises in the 1990s, and the recent introduction of the euro, have renewed interest in alternative exchange rate systems. The choice of exchange rate regime is particularly relevant for emerging-market countries because other countries are perceived either as having no alternative to their current exchange rate arrangement or as highly unlikely to change. This article examines the evolution of exchange rate regimes in emerging markets over the past decade and compares the strengths and weaknesses of the various available systems. These include intermediate regimes, such as the adjustable pegged exchange rate popular throughout much of the post—war period, and the two extreme exchange rate regimes: permanently fixed or freely floating exchange rate regimes. Two recently proposed alternatives are also evaluated: the Managed Floating Plus and Baskets, Bands, and Crawling Pegs. Both try to combine the best elements of the flexible and fixed exchange rate systems, but the Managed Floating Plus is deemed to be the more promising alternative.

Governor Mark Carney reviews the advantages of Canada’s flexible inflation-targeting regime.

In a cashless economy, would the private sector invest in the optimal level of safety in a deposit-based payment system? In general, because of externalities, the answer is no. While the private sector could over- or under-invest in safety, the government can use taxes or subsidies to correct private incentives.

This special issue, “Real-Financial Linkages,” examines the Bank’s research using theoretical and empirical models to improve its understanding of the linkages between financial and macroeconomic developments in the wake of the recent global financial crisis.