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Governor Tiff Macklem discusses how business investment and stronger productivity are vital to sustaining non-inflationary economic growth.

Business investment has been lower than expected in Canada and abroad since the financial crisis of 2007–09. This corporate investment gap is mirrored in firms’ other financing decisions, as they have increased cash holdings and dividend payments and decreased issuance of debt and equity.

As economic slack continues to be absorbed and the labour market tightens, wage growth and inflation could increase faster than expected, which would suggest convexity in their Phillips curves. This note investigates whether there is convexity in the Phillips curves for Canadian wage growth and inflation by testing different empirical approaches over the post-inflation-targeting period.

I use firm-product-level data for Canadian online retailers to study how product scope (the average number of product categories per firm) evolved from 1999 to 2012. During this period, product scope dropped monotonically from 59 to 5 product categories.

Capital markets and their related financial instruments make an important contribution to the welfare of Canadians. The Bank of Canada is interested in the efficient functioning of capital markets through each of its responsibilities for monetary policy, the financial system, and funds management. Hendry and King highlight the key findings of Bank research published over the past year that addresses capital market efficiency and summarize lessons that have been learned. The research conducted thus far suggests that Canadian capital markets are efficient for a capital market of Canada's size but are less diverse than the U.S. capital markets, indicating that there is room for improvement in certain areas.

Extreme weather events contribute to increased volatility in both economic activity and prices, interfering with the assessment of the true underlying trends of the economy. With this in mind, we conduct a timely assessment of the impact of natural disasters on Canadian gross domestic product (GDP).

In this note, I use two multivariate frequency filtering approaches to characterize the Canadian financial cycle by capturing fluctuations in the underlying variables with respect to a long-term trend. The first approach is a dynamically weighted composite, and the second is a stochastic cycle model.

The resurgence of sizable current account imbalances in the major economies in recent years, particularly the tripling of the U.S. deficit, has led to renewed academic and public discussions about their sustainability. Jacob's main objective is to show that current account balances are simply the outcome of various relative structural and cyclical forces between trading partners. He reviews the factors behind the changes in the current account positions of the three largest industrial economies (the United States, Japan, and the euro area). Two strong determinants shaping the current account balances are the faster increase in U.S. productivity compared with that of other major economies and, more recently, the loosening in the U.S. fiscal stance. Jacob also reviews a range of outside assessments from such sources as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development and the International Monetary Fund, as well as the academic literature, to determine the possible risks to macroeconomic and financial stability.

Deputy Governor Agathe Côté discusses the importance of inflation expectations for monetary policy and a new survey the Bank of Canada created to monitor household expectations.

Combining various high frequency financial data with central bank projections, I construct a new measure of monetary policy shocks not predictable by the public information preceding a central bank’s announcements. I then study the causal effects of monetary policy on the macro economy.