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How should central banks design monetary policy in stable times and during recessions? We run a horse race between five monetary policy frameworks in an experimental laboratory to assess how well the different approaches can manage the public’s expectations and stabilize the economy.

The neutral rate serves as a benchmark for measuring monetary stimulus and provides a medium- to long-run anchor for the real policy rate. Global neutral rate estimates have been falling over the past few decades. Factors such as population aging, high corporate savings, and low trend productivity growth are likely to continue supporting a low global neutral rate. These global factors as well as domestic factors are exerting downward pres-sure on the Canadian real neutral rate, which is estimated to be between 0.5 to 1.5 per cent. This low neutral rate has important implications for monetary policy and financial stability.

When China joined the World Trade Organization in December 2001, it marked a watershed for the world economy. Ten years from now, the opening of China’s capital account and the financial integration that will unfold will be viewed as a milestone of similar importance.

Deposit insurance protects depositors from failing banks, thus making insured deposits risk-free. When a deposit insurance limit is increased, some deposits that previously were uninsured become insured, thereby increasing the share of risk-free assets in households’ portfolios. This increase cannot simply be undone by households, because to invest in uninsured deposits, a household must first invest in insured deposits up to the limit. This basic insight is the starting point of the analysis in this paper.

Solving macroeconomic models is difficult. One challenge is the occasionally binding constraint of the zero lower bound on nominal interest rates. This paper reviews various ways to solve models that include this feature.

In the field of economics, on average, women tend to produce fewer research articles and be cited less often than men. But this appears to be changing. A newly compiled dataset about scholars at top universities around the world helps us identify where individual gender gaps exist.

This article begins with a brief examination of the Canadian mortgage market, focusing on the market’s evolution following changes to the Bank Act in 1992, which allowed chartered banks to enter the trust business, and the subsequent entrance of virtual banks and mortgage brokers.

This paper examines the cross-border spillovers from major economies’ quantitative easing (QE) policies to their trading partners. We concentrate on spillovers from the US to Canada during the zero lower bound period when QE policies were actively used.

Recent years have seen renewed interest in the regulation of interbank markets. A review of the literature in this area identifies two gaps: first, the literature has tended to make ad hoc assumptions about the interbank contract space, which makes it difficult to generate convincing policy prescriptions; second, the literature has tended to focus on ex-post interventions that kick in only after an interbank disruption has come underway (e.g., open-market operations, lender-of-last-resort interventions, bail-outs), rather than ex-ante prudential policies.

The emergence of digital currencies such as Bitcoin and the underlying blockchain and distribution ledger technology have attracted significant attention. These developments have raised the possibility of considerable impacts on the financial system and perhaps the wider economy.