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To better understand price-setting behaviour in the Canadian economy, the Bank of Canada's regional offices surveyed a representative sample of 170 firms between July 2002 and March 2003. The authors discuss the reasons behind the survey, the methodology used to develop the questionnaire and conduct the interviews, and summarize the results. The study also assessed several explanations for holding prices steady despite market pressures for a change. The survey findings indicate that prices in Canada are relatively flexible and have become more flexible over the past decade. Price stickiness was generally found to originate in firms' fears of antagonizing customers or disturbing the goodwill or reputation developed with them. A detailed discussion of the results includes a consideration of their implications for monetary policy.

Prima is the Bank of Canada’s new model for projection and policy analysis. It builds on the economic foundations of earlier Bank models, adding detail on how sectoral pressures affect production costs and their pass-through to consumer prices.

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

Offshoring has become an increasingly prominent aspect of the globalization process. Evidence over the past two decades suggests that offshoring has not exerted a noticeable impact on overall employment and earnings growth in advanced economies, but it has likely contributed to shifting the demand for labour towards higher-skilled jobs. There appear to be some positive effects of offshoring on productivity, but such effects differ by country.

This background note explains the Bank’s official position on CBDC. It outlines the public policy, design, technology and risk management issues the Bank is considering as it builds its capacity to issue a CBDC in case it is needed in the future.

We introduce a history of macroprudential policy (MPP) events in Canada since the 1980s. We document the short-run effects of MPP announcements on market-based measures of systemic risk and find that MPPs can influence the market’s perception of large banks’ resilience.

The last few weeks have been a time of turbulence in financial markets. In times such as these, it is common for people to focus on day-by-day or even hour-by-hour events, and to lose sight of the future. But tonight, I want to focus on the future; specifically, the future of inflation targeting in Canada.

Shocks to a currency area can and often do have asymmetric impacts on its regions that, in the absence of perfect labour mobility, lead to gaps in relative labour market performance. Witness, for example, the effects of the 2008/09 recession and subsequent financial crisis in Europe on the dispersion of employment rates across the euro area – and to a lesser extent the United States.

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The "pretended" Bank of Upper Canada — Kingston (1819-22)

The note is part of the National Currency Collection of the Bank of Canada.
Photography by Gord Carter

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.