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Conventional models imply that central banks aiming to raise inflation should lower nominal rates and thus stimulate aggregate demand. However, several economists have recently challenged this conventional wisdom in favour of an alternative “neo-Fisherian’’ view under which higher nominal rates might in fact lead to higher inflation.

It has been a difficult year for capital markets professionals. The turmoil has deteriorated into a full-blown financial crisis. Most financial markets have experienced historic falls in prices, and some are strained to the point of closing.

We evaluate, both empirically and theoretically, the spillover effects that debt-financed fiscal policy interventions of the United States have on other economies. We consider a two-country model with international portfolio rebalancing effects. We show that US fiscal expansions would increase global long-term rates and hinder economic activity in the rest of the world.

While demographic change has been an ongoing process in Canada, labour market implications of an aging population will become more acute in coming years. This article discusses the anticipated slowing in the growth of trend labour input over the coming decades with the aging of the baby boomers, declining fertility rates, and the stabilization of the labour force attachment of women. As the pool of labour shrinks, employers and governments will be looking for ways to address barriers to continued labour force participation and firms will have a greater incentive to find ways of improving labour productivity.

Cash gives users a high level of privacy when making payments, but the use of cash to make payments is declining. People increasingly use debit cards, credit cards or other methods to pay.

Given the influence that agents’ expectations have on key macroeconomic variables, it is surprising that very few papers have tried to extrapolate agents’ “true” expectations directly from the data. This paper presents one such approach, starting with the hypothesis that there is sluggishness in inflation and real GDP growth forecasts.

This article examines recent research on the influence of various forms of economic uncertainty on the performance of different classes of monetary policy rules: from simple rules to fully optimal monetary policy under commitment. The authors explain why uncertainty matters in the design of monetary policy rules and provide quantitative examples from the recent literature. They also present results for several policy rules in ToTEM, the Bank of Canada's main model for projection and analysis, including rules that respond to price level, rather than to inflation.

In this note, we find that market participants react to an unexpected change in the tone of Canadian monetary policy statements. When the market perceives that the Bank of Canada plans to tighten (or alternatively, loosen) the monetary policy earlier than previously expected, the Canadian dollar appreciates (or depreciates) and long-term Government of Canada bond yields increase (or decrease). The tone of a statement is particularly relevant to the market when the policy rate has been unchanged for some time.