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The 2007–09 global financial crisis has led policy-makers around the world, including central banks, to refocus their efforts to promote financial stability. As part of this process, central banks became quite active in supporting financial stability in a variety of ways, such as publicly sharing their assessments of financial system vulnerabilities and risks and helping to strengthen regulation, supervision and macroprudential measures.

In 2016 and 2017, the Bank of Canada added questions to the Business Outlook Survey on firms’ expectations for the magnitude of change in their sales volumes, number of employees, investment spending, input prices and selling prices. This backgrounder describes how the responses are aggregated and examines their relationship with macroeconomic and price measures.

Developments are underway to replace Canada’s two core payment systems with three new systems. We use a discrete choice model to predict migration patterns of end-users and financial institutions for future systems and discuss their policy implications.

The consumer price index (CPI) is the most commonly used measure to track changes in the overall level of prices. Since it departs from a true cost-of-living index, the CPI is subject to four types of measurement bias—commodity substitution, outlet substitution, new goods and quality adjustment. The author updates previous Bank of Canada estimates of measurement bias in the Canadian CPI by examining these four sources of potential bias. He finds the total measurement bias over the 2005–11 period to be about 0.5 percentage point per year, consistent with the Bank’s earlier findings. Slightly more than half of this bias is caused by the fixed nature of the CPI basket of goods and services.

Inflation can affect both the dispersion of commodity-specific price levels across locations (relative price variability, RPV) and the dispersion of inflation rates (relative inflation variability, RIV). Some menu-cost models and models of consumer search suggest that the RIV-inflation relationship could differ from the RPV-inflation relationship.

Deputy Governor Sylvain Leduc discusses how upgrading Canada’s core payment systems will contribute to financial stability and help the Bank keep inflation on target.

During downturns, workers get stuck in low-productivity jobs and wages remain stagnant. I build an heterogenous agent incomplete market model with a full job ladder that accounts for these facts. An adverse financial shock calibrated to the US Great Recession replicates the period’s slow recovery and missing disinflation.

Oil prices have declined sharply over the past three years. While both supply and demand factors played a role in the large oil price decline of 2014, global supply growth seems to have been the predominant force. The most important drivers were likely the surprising growth of US shale oil production, the output decisions of the Organization of the Petro-leum Exporting Countries and the weaker-than-expected global growth that followed the 2009 global financial crisis.

Éric Chouinard and Graydon Paulin review the progress to date in implementing Basel III, the new framework of global regulatory standards for the banking sector developed by the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision. The report highlights the expected net benefits of implementing Basel III, as well as the challenges in ensuring international consistency in measuring the risk-weighted capital of banks. It includes a discussion on how implementing Basel III has affected the banking system in Canada and other important jurisdictions, and demonstrates the need for ongoing assessment of the effects on the financial system and the macroeconomy.