Search

The TSX index rose by 9.5 percent in November 2020, adding large gains to an already sharp V-shaped recovery. The economic outlook improved at that time as well. We ask whether the stock market gains since last autumn are due to improving forecasts of firms’ earnings.

The 2002 Bank of Canada Conference focused on price adjustment, a critically important issue for monetary policy. Given the acceptance throughout the 1990s and 2000s of the existence of price stickiness in goods or labour markets, or both, and of the important role that monetary policy can play in an economy, the time was right for a conference that would focus on current developments in this area of research, particularly within a Canadian context. Conference papers covering both theoretical and empirical studies explored such themes as sources of the persistence of inflation, forward-looking models of inflation, models of inflation in open economies, the macroeconomic effects of technology shocks, and models of the interaction between wages, prices, and real economic outcomes.

In recent years, significant efforts have been made to attract more women into academia and to support their careers, with the goal of increasing their representation.

Using Canadian matched employer-employee data, we show that working hours of different workers are gross complements in production rather than perfect substitutes, as is typically assumed by macroeconomic models of production.

We assess the response of Government of Canada bond yields to the Bank of Canada’s initial announcement of the Government Bond Purchase Program (GBPP) as well as to the Bank’s later GBPP purchase operations.

This article summarizes the proceedings of an international research conference hosted by the Bank of Canada in November 2000. The conference marked the fiftieth anniversary of Canada's adoption of a flexible exchange rate, and its title recognizes the seminal contribution of Professor Milton Friedman's article "The Case for Flexible Exchange Rates." His keynote address to the conference is also summarized in the article. The conference papers re-examine many of the arguments raised by Friedman using recent developments in economic theory and econometric techniques. They investigate the experience of a wide range of industrialized and emerging-market economies. The main findings are that a strong case can be made for flexible exchange rates in economies that are large commodity exporters and that have credible low-inflation monetary policies and relatively well-developed financial systems.

We propose an open-economy New Keynesian model with financial integration that allows financial intermediaries to hold foreign long-term bonds. We study the implications of financial integration on monetary policy transmission. Among various aspects of financial integration, the bond duration plays a major role. These results hold for conventional and unconventional monetary policies.

While the Bank of Canada's inflation-control target is specified in terms of the rate of increase in the total consumer price index, the Bank uses a measure of trend or "core" inflation as a short-term guide for its monetary policy actions. When the inflation targets were renewed in May 2001, the Bank announced that it was adopting a new measure of core inflation. This measure excludes the eight most volatile components of the CPI and adjusts the remaining components for the effect of changes in indirect taxes. In this article, the author discusses the definition of the new measure of core inflation and describes some of its advantages relative to the previous measure. He notes that the new measure has a firmer statistical basis, has a better correspondence with economic theory, and does a better job of predicting future changes in overall inflation. While the new measure has these advantages, the Bank will continue to monitor a broad range of indicators when assessing the likely future path for inflation.

Privacy is a key aspect of a potential central bank digital currency system. We outline different technical choices to enact various privacy models while complying with the appropriate regulations. We develop a framework to evaluate privacy models and list key risks and trade-offs in privacy design.

Production efficiency and financial stability do not necessarily go hand in hand. With heterogeneity in banks’ abilities to screen borrowers, the market for loans becomes segmented and a self-competition mechanism arises. When heterogeneity increases, the intensive and extensive margins have opposite effects.