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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.

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.

We revisit an old question: how do financial constraints affect the transmission of monetary policy to the real economy? To answer this question, we propose a simple empirical strategy that combines firm-level employment and balance sheet data, identified monetary policy shocks and survey data on financing activities.

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.

The classical dichotomy predicts that all of the time-series variance in the aggregate real exchange rate is accounted for by non-traded goods in the consumer price index (CPI) basket because traded goods obey the Law of One Price. In stark contrast, Engel (1999) claimed the opposite: that traded goods accounted for all of the variance.

Contactless payment cards are a competitive alternative to cash. Using Canadian panel data from 2010 to 2017, this study investigates whether contactless credit cards are an important contributor to the decline in the transactional use of cash. 

This paper explores the impact of extreme weather exposures on the financial outcomes of low-income households. Our findings highlight the heightened financial vulnerability of low-income households to environmental shocks and underscore the need for targeted policies.

We examine the Canadian money market fund (MMF) sector and find that it has grown rapidly, holding a large share of treasury bills and commercial paper. Unlike in some other jurisdictions where investor outflows likely amplified stresses, Canadian MMFs experienced inflows during the March 2020 market turmoil.

The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the need for policy-makers to closely monitor disruptions to the retail and food business sectors. We present a new method to measure business opening and closing rates using real-time data from Google Places, the dataset behind the Google Maps service.

Can daycare replace parents’ time spent with children? We explore this by using data on how parents spend time and money on children and how this spending is related to their child’s development.