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The financial system makes an important contribution to the welfare of all Canadians. The ability of households and firms to confidently hold and transfer financial assets is one of the fundamental building blocks of the Canadian economy.

A significant body of empirical studies demonstrates sizable national border effects in foreign trade of Canadian provinces throughout the 1980s and 1990s. This paper revisits and expands the scope of the border effects analysis by estimating the border effect in trade with U.S. states as well as countries in the European Union (EU) and the G 20 using more recent data from 2001–10.

The conduct of monetary policy within an inflation-targeting framework requires the establishment of an inflation-target horizon, which is the average time it takes inflation to return to the target. Policy-makers have an interest in communicating this horizon, since it is likely to help anchor inflation expectations. This article focuses on the determination of the appropriate policy horizon by reporting on two recent Bank of Canada studies. The evidence suggests that the current target horizon of six to eight quarters remains appropriate. It is important to note that the duration of the optimal inflation-target horizon varies widely, depending on the combination of shocks to the economy. In rare cases when the financial accelerator is triggered by a persistent shock, such as an asset-price bubble, it may be appropriate to take a longer view of the inflation-target horizon.

The first step in designing effective policies to stabilize an economy is to understand business cycles. No country is isolated from the world economy and external shocks are becoming increasingly important.

Flood, Morin, and Kolet examine the role of house prices in household consumption decisions. Considering a group of advanced economies, the authors find that the strength of the link between house prices and consumer spending depends on the institutional features of national mortgage markets.

This paper introduces heterogeneous beliefs among households in a small open economy model for the Canadian economy. The model suggests that simultaneous boom-bust cycles in house prices, output, investment, consumption and hours worked emerge when credit-constrained mortgage borrowers expect that future house prices will rise and this expectation is neither shared by savers nor realized ex-post.

This paper discusses the merits and shortcomings of alternative price indices used in constructing real effective exchange rate indices and examines the effects of different weighting schemes. It also compares selected measures of the real effective exchange rate in terms of their ability to explain movements in Canadian net exports and real output. The paper […]

The Bank of Canada’s Government of Canada Bond Purchase Program, launched in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, lowered the weighted average maturity of the Government of Canada’s debt by approximately 1.4 years. This in turn reduced Canadian 10-year and 5-year zero-coupon yields by 84 and 52 basis points, respectively.

According to the Fisher hypothesis, the gap between Canadian nominal and Real Return Bond yields (or break-even inflation rate) should be a good measure of inflation expectations.

The workhorse DSGE model used for monetary policy evaluation is designed to capture business cycle fluctuations in an optimization-based format. It is commonplace to log-linearize models and express them with variables in deviation-from-steady-state format.