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The prices of commodities produced in Canada have important implications for the performance of the Canadian economy and the conduct of monetary policy. The authors explain an important change to the methodology used to construct the Bank of Canada commodity price index (BCPI).

The good forecasting performance of factor models has been well documented in the literature. While many studies focus on a very limited set of variables (typically GDP and inflation), this study evaluates forecasting performance at disaggregated levels to examine the source of the improved forecasting accuracy, relative to a simple autoregressive model. We use the latest revision of over 100 U.S. time series over the period 1974-2009 (monthly and quarterly data).

Security prices contain valuable information that can be used to make a wide variety of economic decisions. To extract this information, a model is required that relates market prices to the desired information, and that ideally can be implemented using timely and low-cost methods.

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.

We use a novel approach to identify economic developments that drive exchange rates in the long run. Using a panel of six quarterly U.S. bilateral real exchange rates – Australia, Canada, the euro, Japan, New Zealand and the United Kingdom – over the 1980-2007 period, a dynamic factor model points to two common factors.

The workhorse DSGE model used for monetary policy evaluation is designed to capture business cycle fluctuations in an optimization-based format. It is commonplace to log-linearize models and express them with variables in deviation-from-steady-state format.

We propose a new test for a multivariate parametric conditional distribution of a vector of variables y_t given a conditional vector x_t.

A sequential Monte Carlo method for estimating GARCH models subject to an unknown number of structural breaks is proposed. Particle filtering techniques allow for fast and efficient updates of posterior quantities and forecasts in real time.

Corporate bond spreads worldwide have widened markedly since the beginning of the credit crisis in 2007. This article examines default and liquidity risk–the main components of the corporate bond spread–for Canadian firms that issue bonds in the U.S. market, focusing in particular on their evolution during the credit crisis. They find that, during this period, the liquidity component increased more for speculative-grade bonds than it did for investment-grade bonds, consistent with a "flight-to-quality" phenomenon. An important implication of their results for policy-makers seeking to address problems in credit markets is that the liquidity risk in corporate spreads for investment and speculative bonds behaves differently than the default risk, especially during crisis episodes.

Real wage rigidities have recently been proposed as a way of building intrinsic persistence in inflation within the context of New Keynesian Phillips Curves. Using two recent illustrative structural models, we evaluate empirically the importance of real wage rigidities in the data and the extent to which such models provide useful information regarding price stickiness.