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We examine how intermediary capitalization affects asset prices in a framework that allows for intermediary market power. We introduce a model in which capital-constrained intermediaries buy or trade an asset in an imperfectly competitive market, and we show that weaker capital constraints lead to both higher prices and intermediary markups.

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.

Monetary policy in the presence of nominal debt and labour supply heterogeneity creates a policy trade-off: a short-term economic stimulus leads to persistently reduced output over the medium term. Price-level targeting weakens this trade-off and is better able to stabilize inflation and output than inflation targeting.

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.

Using a novel data set for 17 countries dating from 1900 to 2013, we characterize business cycles in both small developed and developing countries in a model with financial frictions and a common shock structure. We estimate the model jointly for these 17 countries using Bayesian methods.

I use a structural vector autoregression (SVAR) with sign restrictions to provide conditional evidence on the behavior of the US external finance premium (EFP). The results indicate that the excess bond premium, a proxy for the EFP, reacts countercyclically to supply and monetary policy shocks and procyclically to demand shocks.

This paper identifies aggregate financial shocks and quantifies their effects on business investment based on an estimated DSGE model with firm-level heterogeneity. On average, financial shocks contribute only 3% of the variation in U.S. public firms’ aggregate investment.

This paper quantifies the contribution of sector-specific supply and demand shocks to personal consumption expenditure (PCE) inflation. It derives identification restrictions that are consistent with a large class of dynamic stochastic general equilibrium models with production networks.

One year later, we review the events that took place in Canadian fixed-income markets at the beginning of the COVID-19 crisis and propose potential policy research questions for future work.