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Although the current inflation-targeting regime has served Canadians well, sound public policy demands the continuous exploration of possible improvements in the monetary policy framework.

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.

The author studies the welfare implications of adjustment programs supported by the International Monetary Fund (IMF). He uses a model where an endogenous borrowing constraint, set up by international lenders who will never lend more than a debt ceiling, forces the borrowing economy to always choose repayment over default.

A longstanding finding in the forecasting literature is that averaging forecasts from different models often improves upon forecasts based on a single model, with equal weight averaging working particularly well. This paper analyzes the effects of trimming the set of models prior to averaging.

We explain how the Bank of Canada’s policy models capture the trade-off between output and inflation in Canada. We provide new estimates of the trade-off and contrast them with those in the Bank’s macroeconomic models.

This paper builds a two-country DSGE model to study the quantitative impact of financial frictions on business cycle co-movements when investors have foreign asset exposure. The investor in each country holds capital in both countries and faces a leverage constraint on her debt.

This article describes experimental economics, in general, and new developments in experimental macroeconomics, in particular. The approach has a clear niche in providing evidence on economic phenomena that cannot be observed directly or that are difficult to measure. Experimental work conducted by Bank of Canada economists has shed light on a number of issues important to monetary policy, such as the relative efficacy between price-level and inflation targeting, and the nature of inflation expectations formation.

The paper employs a unique identification strategy that links survey data on household consumption expenditure to bank-level data in order to estimate the effects of bank financial distress on consumer credit and consumption expenditures.

Offshoring has become an increasingly prominent aspect of the globalization process. Evidence over the past two decades suggests that offshoring has not exerted a noticeable impact on overall employment and earnings growth in advanced economies, but it has likely contributed to shifting the demand for labour towards higher-skilled jobs. There appear to be some positive effects of offshoring on productivity, but such effects differ by country.

Governor Tiff Macklem talks about the COVID-19 pandemic and major economic forces are affecting the labour market, and the need for all groups to benefits from the recovery.