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Access to information about the future direction of the exchange rate can be extremely valuable in the foreign exchange market. Evidence presented in this article suggests that Canadian dealers are more likely to provide interday liquidity to foreign, rather than Canadian, financial customers, since foreign financial flows can be more informative about future movements in the exchange rate. The author reveals a statistical relationship between the supply of liquidity provided by non-financial firms and that provided by dealing institutions across time, and across markets, and suggests that the relationship between the positions of commercial clients and market-makers, and the role played by dealers in interday liquidity provision, has been understated in the market microstructure literature.

We document the outcome of an options decimalization pilot on Canada’s derivatives exchange. Decimalization improves measures of liquidity and price efficiency. The impact differs by the moneyness of an option and is greatest for out-of-the-money options.

Using a nonlinear New Keynesian model with a financial accelerator, we show that financial frictions generate large state-dependent amplification effects. Shocks propagate more strongly in periods of financial stress. We propose an endogenous regime-switching DSGE framework for efficient estimation and improved model fit.

The common-factor hypothesis is one possible explanation for the housing wealth effect. Under this hypothesis, house price appreciation is related to changes in consumption as long as the available proxies for the common driver of housing and non-housing demand are noisy and housing supply is not perfectly elastic.

We introduce limited information in monetary policy. Agents receive signals from the central bank revealing new information (“news") about the future evolution of the policy rate before changes in the rate actually take place. However, the signal is disturbed by noise.

This article provides an overview of the growth of Canadian-dollar-denominated assets in official foreign reserves. Based on International Monetary Fund data and on internal Bank of Canada analysis, we estimate that the total reserve holdings of Canadian-dollar assets increased from negligible levels before 2008 to around US$200 billion in the third quarter of 2013. We discuss the determinants of this increase, as well as its potential impact on Canadian debt markets, for example, lower yields and therefore reduced financing costs for the Government of Canada, and the possible negative impact on market liquidity.

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.

Until recently, few efforts have been made 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 (BoC) developed a comprehensive database of sovereign defaults that is posted on its website and updated in partnership with the Bank of England (BoE).

This paper presents Bank of Canada staff’s current assessment of the US neutral rate, along with a newly developed set of models on which that assessment is based. The overall assessment is that the US neutral rate currently lies in a range of 1.75 to 2.75 percent.