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The Financial System Review is one vehicle that the Bank of Canada uses to contribute to the strength of the Canadian financial system. The Developments and Trends section of the Review aims to provide analysis and discussion of current developments and trends in the Canadian financial sector.

Using an error-correction model (ECM) framework, the authors attempt to quantify the degree of disequilibrium in Canadian housing stock over the period 1961–2008 for the national aggregate and over 1981–2008 for the provinces.

Business investment has been lower than expected in Canada and abroad since the financial crisis of 2007–09. This corporate investment gap is mirrored in firms’ other financing decisions, as they have increased cash holdings and dividend payments and decreased issuance of debt and equity.

We investigate the extent to which excess supply (demand) in labour markets contributes to a lower (higher) growth rate of average nominal wages for workers. Using panel methods on data from 10 advanced economies for 1992–2018, we produce reduced-form estimates of a wage Phillips curve specification that is consistent with a New Keynesian framework.

Until recently, few efforts have been made to systematically measure and aggregate the nominal value of the different types of sovereign government debt in default. To help fill this gap, the Bank of Canada (BoC) developed a comprehensive database of sovereign defaults that is posted on its website and updated in partnership with the Bank of England (BoE).

The objective of this article is to improve our understanding of counterfeiting and its policy implications by reviewing research in this area. There has been almost no empirical work on counterfeiting because of the limited availability of counterfeiting data and related statistics. The authors therefore focus on theoretical studies that directly model the behaviour of the relevant economic agents. They first establish some stylized facts about counterfeiting to provide a general understanding of the problem. They then briefly review several models of counterfeiting and summarize their relevant insights, focusing on the implications of the findings for the incentive to counterfeit, social welfare and anti-counterfeiting policies. The authors find that the policy implications of these studies support the Bank’s comprehensive anti-counterfeiting strategy.

Traditional models of exchange rate regimes ignore the destabilizing effects of sharp and unanticipated exchange rate movements.

In this report, we evaluate several simple monetary policy rules in twelve private and public sector models of the Canadian economy. Our results indicate that none of the simple policy rules we examined is robust to model uncertainty, in that no single rule performs well in all models.

We examine how consumers have adjusted their payment habits during the COVID-19 pandemic. They seem to perform fewer transactions, spend more in each transaction, use less cash at the point of sale and withdraw cash from ATMs linked to their financial institution more often than from other ATMs.

Deputy Governor Sharon Kozicki discusses the use of exceptional monetary policy tools during the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as the Bank’s commitment to transparency and accountability.