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In this issue, Bank researchers discuss the muted recovery from the 2007–09 financial crisis and possible causes. There are also discussions about the Bank’s new Canadian survey of household expectations, measuring both durable goods and housing prices in the CPI and how regulatory changes may affect monetary policy operating frameworks. In the final article, improvements to the management of Canada’s foreign exchange reserves are introduced.

A regulator would want to restrict dividends to force banks to rebuild capital during a crisis. But such a policy is not time-consistent. A time-consistent policy would let banks gradually rebuild capital and pay dividends even when their equity remains below pre-crisis levels.

This analytical note examines how much of the systematic variation in the Canadian dollar is attributable to its sensitivity to commodity prices. We introduce a new “oil” portfolio that captures systematic variations when the exchange rates of commodity exporters and commodity importers move in opposite directions.

Is shale oil production in the United States a factor in the 2014 oil price decline? Which methods of payment are commonly accepted by merchants in Canada? Bank researchers share their insights on these topics. They also provide an update on the neutral rate of interest as well as on changes to the Bank’s operational framework for market operations.

We summarize the review and renewal process at four central banks (Reserve Bank of New Zealand, Bank of England, Sveriges Riksbank and the US Federal Reserve Bank) and compare them with the process at the Bank of Canada, which has been well-established since 2001.

The Bank of Canada’s current suite of models faces challenges in addressing network effects that integrate household and firm-level heterogeneity and their behaviours. We develop CANVAS, a Canadian behavioural agent-based model to contribute to the Bank’s next-generation modelling effort. CANVAS improves forecasting performance and expands capacity for model-based scenario analysis.

Business cycles are substantially correlated across countries. Yet most existing models are not able to generate substantial transmission through international trade. We show that the nature of such transmission depends fundamentally on the features determining the responsiveness of labor supply and labor demand to international relative prices.

This article explores the evolution of capital flows to emerging markets over the last 30 years with emphasis on the past decade. Capital markets in emerging-market economies have evolved substantially over the period, becoming increasingly deep and resilient. The author looks at how capital flows to these countries have changed in terms of magnitude, geographical distribution, the financial instruments used, and the country of origin. He also examines how changes in the investor base have affected these flows and reviews the factors underlying the growth of private capital flows in the 1990s.

We estimate the effect that owning Bitcoin has on the amount of cash held by Canadian consumers. Our results question the view that adopting certain new technologies, such as Bitcoin, leads to a decline in cash holdings.