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How should a central bank conduct quantitative easing (QE) in a monetary union when regions differ in their size and portfolio characteristics? Optimal QE policy suggests allocating greater purchases from the region that faces stronger portfolio frictions, and not necessarily according to each region’s size.

We study the labour market and welfare effects of expanding unemployment insurance benefits and introducing payroll subsidies during the COVID-19 pandemic. We find that both policies are complementary and are beneficial to different types of workers. Payroll subsidies preserve the employment of workers in highly productive jobs, while unemployment insurance replaces lost income for workers who experience inevitable job loss.

Specifications of the Federal Reserve target rate that have more realistic features mitigate in-sample over-fitting and are favored in the data.

In a simple two-sector New Keynesian model, sticky prices generate a counterfactual negative comovement between the output of durable and nondurable goods following a monetary policy shock. We show that heterogeneous factor markets allow any combination of strictly positive price stickiness to generate positive output comovement.

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Moroccan Coin Moulds

This bronze mould from Morocco is part of the National Currency Collection, Bank of Canada.
Photography by Gord Carter, Ottawa.

This article examines four indicators of balance-sheet risks—leverage, capital, asset liquidity and funding—among different types of financial institutions in Canada over the past three decades. It also discusses relevant developments in the banking sector that could have contributed to the observed dynamics. The authors find that the various risk indicators decreased during the period for most of the non-Big Six financial institutions, but remained relatively unchanged for the Big Six banks. In addition, the balance-sheet risk indicators became more heterogeneous across financial institutions. The observed overall decline and increased heterogeneity follow certain regulatory changes, such as the introduction of the liquidity guidelines on funding in 1995 and the implementation of bank-specific leverage requirements in 2000. Given that these regulations required more balance-sheet risk management, they have likely contributed to the increased resilience of the banking sector.

Senior Deputy Governor Carolyn Wilkins discusses the risks and opportunities for Canada of China’s economic transition.

We use a small open economy model with overlapping generations to evaluate secular dynamics of the neutral rate in Canada from 1980 to 2018. We find that changes in both foreign and domestic factors resulted in a protracted decline in the neutral rate.

The Canadian dollar has declined against the US dollar since October 2024, mostly due to rising uncertainty around trade policies. A widening differential in policy interest rates between the two countries has also played a modest role.

We present a simple model to study the risk sensitivity of capital regulation. A banker funds investment with uninsured deposits and costly capital, where capital resolves a moral hazard problem in the banker’s choice of risk.