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This paper develops a model of an economy where bank credit supports both productive investment and individual consumption smoothing in the face of idiosyncratic income risk. Bank credit is constrained by bank equity capital.

This paper develops a theoretical framework to infer the nature of fixed costs from the relationship between entry patterns in international markets and destination market size. If fixed costs are at the firm level, firms take advantage of an intrafirm spillover by expanding firm-level product range (scope).

Using a rich data set on government spending forecasts in Japan, we provide new evidence on the effects of unexpected changes in government spending when the nominal interest rate is near the zero lower bound (ZLB).

The authors assess the stabilization properties of simple monetary policy rules within the context of a small open-economy model constructed around the limited-participation assumption and calibrated to salient features of the Canadian economy. By relying on limited participation as the main nominal friction that affects the artificial economy, the authors provide an important check of the robustness of the results obtained using alternative environments in the literature on monetary policy rules, most notably the now-standard "New Keynesian" paradigm that emphasizes rigidities in the price-setting mechanism.

Beginning with a review of the adoption of inflation targeting in a broad group of countries, Paulin focuses on changes in the design of inflation-targeting frameworks in light of fifteen years of accumulated experience. Included in the discussion are the use of numerical targets and ranges, the policy horizon, supporting institutional policy structures, and communication, including the publication of forecasts. A recurring theme is how much flexibility an inflation-targeting regime allows. The article concludes that the changes made to the frameworks have been relatively modest since their adoption, but in concert with the improved credibility that has resulted from central banks meeting their inflation-control targets, they have allowed an increasingly nuanced response to economic shocks.

The authors conduct a counterfactual simulation of the proposed rules under the new Basel Capital Accord (Basel II), including the revised treatment of expected and unexpected credit losses proposed by the Basel Committee in October 2003.

This paper imagines a world in which countries are on the Bitcoin standard, a monetary system in which all media of exchange are Bitcoin or are backed by it. The paper explores the similarities and differences between the Bitcoin standard and the gold standard and describes the media of exchange that would exist under the Bitcoin standard.

We build an otherwise-standard business cycle model with housework, calibrated consistently with data on time use, in order to discipline consumption-hours complementarity and relate its strength to the size of fiscal multipliers.

The Bank of Canada's new Quarterly Projection Model, QPM, combines the short-term dynamic properties necessary to support regular economic projections with the consistent behavioural structure necessary for policy analysis.

The author provides an overview of the 1975–78 Anti-Inflation Program (AIP), in a background document prepared for a seminar organized by the Bank of Canada to mark the AIP's 30th anniversary.