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This issue focuses on the upcoming renewal of Canada’s inflation-control target. Bank researchers discuss the estimate of the lower bound to policy interest rates in Canada. They also discuss downward nominal wage rigidity and whether its presence warrants considering a higher inflation target. The third article highlights the experience some international central banks have had with unconventional monetary policies. The final article describes monetary policy frameworks in 10 advanced economies.

Central counterparties can make over-the-counter markets more resilient and reduce systemic risk by mitigating and managing counterparty credit risk. These benefits are maximized when access to central counterparties is available to a wide range of market participants. In an over-the-counter market, there is an important trade-off between risk and competition. A model of an over-the-counter market shows how risk and competition could be influenced by the incentives of market participants as they move to central clearing. In a centrally cleared market, there may be less risk when participation is high. This helps to explain why regulators have put in place requirements for fair, open and risk-based access criteria.

Until recently, there have been few efforts to systematically measure and aggregate the nominal value of the different types of sovereign government debt in default. To help fill this gap, the Bank of Canada’s Credit Rating Assessment Group (CRAG) has developed a comprehensive database of sovereign defaults posted on the Bank of Canada’s website that now is updated in partnership with the Bank of England.

Technical data relating to the 2001 target renewal.

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.

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.

The theory that rich economic diversity of businesses and households both affects and is shaped by economy-wide fluctuations has strong implications for monetary policy. This review places these insights in a Canadian context.

Using newly matched data on US defense contracts and restricted administrative employment data, we show that the employment effects of defense procurement are costly, concentrated and slow to diffuse.

We show that a large share of low-frequency (quarterly) movements in Canadian government bond yields can be explained by macroeconomic news, even though high-frequency (daily) changes are driven by other shocks. Furthermore, we show that US macro news—not domestic news— explains most of the quarterly variation in Canadian bond yields.