The Bank of Canada maintains regular contact with financial institutions as part of the information-gathering process that feeds into the larger set of information used to arrive at its monetary policy decision. Since 1999, the Bank has been conducting a quarterly survey of the business-lending practices of major Canadian financial institutions. Analysis of the information collected shows that it is correlated with future growth in both credit and business investment. This article focuses on how the survey is conducted and describes the construction of the summary statistics, highlighting the key statistical relationships in the historical survey data.
: Financial Institutions; Monetary and financial indicators; Recent economic and financial developmentsThe authors introduce new measures of important underlying macroeconomic phenomena that affect the financial side of the economy.
: Credit and credit aggregates; Econometric and statistical methods; Monetary aggregatesTechnological innovations in the financial industry pose major problems for the measurement of monetary aggregates. The authors describe work on a new measure of money that has a more satisfactory means of identifying and removing the effects of financial innovations.
: Econometric and statistical methods; Monetary aggregates; Monetary and financial indicatorsIn this paper known results about the equivalence of state space and autoregressive moving-average models with exogenous inputs (ARMAX) (including vector auto-regressive or VAR models) are reviewed. While most of these results are not new, no single reference appears to bring together several important related points.
