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In this analytical note we show that the share of the systematic variations in the Canadian dollar has risen significantly in the past two decades. Systematic variations in the exchange rate are shared with other currencies. This parallels the equity market, where variations in the price of a given stock are shared with variations in the prices of other stocks.

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.

We explore the long-run effects of a monetary policy shock in a Heterogeneous Agent New Keynesian model built on the micro evidence that job losses lead to persistently lower individual earnings through a combination of skill decay and abandonment of the labour force.

Financial frictions affect how much consumers spend on durable and non-durable goods. Borrowers can face both loan-to-value (LTV) constraints and payment-to-income (PTI) constraints.

Over the past 20 years, there has been a major shift away from the use of paper-based retail payment instruments, such as cash and cheques, toward electronic means of payment, such as debit cards and credit cards. Recent Bank of Canada research on consumers’ choice of payment instruments indicates that cash is frequently used for transactions with low values because of its speed, ease of use and wide acceptance, while debit and credit cards are more commonly used for transactions with higher values because of perceived attributes such as safety and record keeping. While innovations in retail payments currently being introduced into the Canadian marketplace could lead to a further reduction in the use of cash over the longer term, the implications for the use of cash of some of the structural and regulatory developments under way are less clear.

In this analysis, we use simulations in the Bank of Canada’s projection model—the Terms-of-Trade Economic Model—to consider a suite of extended monetary policies to support the economy following the COVID-19 crisis.

This article explores the role of inflation expectations in the conduct of monetary policy. It reviews the various measures of inflation expectations used by central banks, including surveys and market-based indicators, and considers their advantages and disadvantages. It examines the critical role of inflation expectations in the framework that central banks use to understand, forecast, and control inflation. It also looks at their role as an indicator of central bank credibility. The behaviour of inflation expectations over the past two years is analyzed and policy conclusions are offered.

This paper studies how the allocation of residual losses affects trading and welfare in a central counterparty. I compare loss sharing under two loss-allocation mechanisms – variation margin haircutting and cash calls – and study the privately and socially optimal degree of loss sharing.

An anonymous token-based central bank digital currency (CBDC) would pose certain security risks to users. These risks arise from how balances are aggregated, from their transactional use and from the competition between suppliers of aggregation solutions.

This paper attempts to borrow the tradition of estimating policy reaction functions in monetary policy literature and apply it to capital controls policy literature. Using a novel weekly dataset on capital controls policy actions in 21 emerging economies over the period 1 January 2001 to 31 December 2015, I examine the mercantilist and macroprudential motivations for capital control policies.