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I quantify the importance of changes in household preferences on household inflation rates using 11 years of scanner data for 11,000 US households. My results suggest that changes in household preferences are an important driver of inflation dynamics at the household level.

Remarks by David Longworth, Deputy Governor of the Bank of Canada to the Canadian Association for Business Economics

We study a government policy that restricts repayment choices with the aim of reducing credit card debt and estimate its effects by applying a difference-in-differences methodology to comprehensive credit-reporting data about Canadian consumers. We find the policy has trade-offs: reducing revolving debt comes at a cost of reducing credit access, and potentially increasing delinquency.

This paper examines the direct effects of industrial robot adoption on workers and owners within Canadian private corporations. Adoption increases firm scale and per-worker payroll but does not decrease the labor share of value added. Conventional accounting of labor income earned by owners masks the impact on non-owner workers.

We investigate the uncertainty around stock returns at different investment horizons. Since a return is either a loss or a gain, we categorize return uncertainty into two components—loss uncertainty and gain uncertainty. We then use these components to evaluate investment.

We model the introduction of a new payment method, e.g., e-money, that competes with an existing payment method, e.g., cash. The new payment method involves relatively lower per-transaction costs for both buyers and sellers, but sellers must pay a fixed fee to accept the new payment method.

As a guide for the conduct of monetary policy, most central banks make use of a trend inflation index similar to that employed by the Bank of Canada: the CPI excluding food, energy, and the effect of indirect taxes. In addition to their basic reference index, some central banks regularly publish statistical measures of the trend rate of inflation. The method used for producing these measures is, for the most part, based on the hypothesis that extreme price fluctuations generally reflect temporary shocks to the inflation rate, rather than its underlying trend. In this paper, the author offers a broad survey of studies on the measurement of trend inflation that have been published by the Bank of Canada and presents the results of the most recent work on the subject. Particular attention is paid to two statistical measures that the Bank follows more closely than other measures; namely, the CPIX, a price index that excludes eight of the most volatile CPI components, and CPIW, a measure that retains all the components of the overall index but gives a lower weighting to the most volatile.

This paper reviews the range of extraordinary programs launched by the Bank of Canada in response to the pandemic-related financial market disruption. It provides some recommendations for future interventions to ensure the programs are appropriately structured for the financial and economic stresses they are intended to address.

Ron Morrow, Executive Director of Payments, Supervision and Oversight, talks about innovations in the payments ecosystem. He also highlights the Bank’s new role as supervisor of payment service providers.