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Forward guidance is one of the policy tools that a central bank can implement if it seeks to provide additional monetary stimulus when it is operating at the effective lower bound (ELB) on interest rates. It became more widely used during and after the global financial crisis.

A blockchain is a digital ledger that keeps track of a record of ownership without the need for a designated party to update and enforce changes to the record. The updating of the ledger is done directly by the users of the blockchain and is traditionally governed by a proof-of-work (PoW) protocol.

One of the central lessons learned from the Great Depression was that adjusting government spending each year to balance the budget increases the volatility of output.

The authors examine evidence of long- and short-run co-movement in Canadian sectoral output data. Their framework builds on a vector-error-correction representation that allows them to test for and compute full-information maximum-likelihood estimates of models with codependent cycle restrictions.

We examine the optimal amount of user anonymity in a central bank digital currency in the context of bank lending. Anonymity, defined as the lender’s inability to discern an entrepreneur’s actions that enable fund diversion, influences the choice of payment instrument due to its impact on a bank’s lending decisions.

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.

Inflation targeting (IT) had originally been introduced as a device to bring inflation down and stabilize it at low levels. Given the current environment of persistently weak inflation in many advanced economies, IT central banks must now bring inflation up to target.

Operational events in the Large Value Transfer System (LVTS) almost always result in a disturbance of the regular flow of payments.

Inflation rates in advanced economies experienced two consecutive puzzles during the period following the global financial crisis—unexpectedly high inflation from the end of 2009 to 2011 and unexpectedly low inflation from 2012 to the middle of 2014. We investigate these developments in two ways. First, we show that accounting for inflation expectations by households explains a significant share of the inflation puzzles at the international level. Second, we find that, for Canada, elevated competition in the retail sector is also important for understanding inflation dynamics in the post-crisis period.

Inflation equals the product of two terms: an extensive margin (the fraction of items with price changes) and an intensive margin (the average size of those changes).