Staff research

We consider two trade-offs inherent to extraordinary forward guidance (EFG): potency versus flexibility, and the credibility of forward guidance versus the credibility of inflation targeting. We argue that the form of EFG used by the Bank of Canada during the COVID‑19 pandemic balanced both trade-offs relatively well.

An economy with fixed amortization mortgages and borrowing-constrained consumers leads to the level of inflation targeted having real effects on home ownership, consumption, and debt. Using a life-cycle housing tenure choice model, we show that by front-loading real mortgage payments, higher inflation lowers steady-state home ownership and the mortgage-debt-to-income ratio.

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Strong population growth, low interest rates and robust investor demand drove an expansion in Toronto’s condo market over the past decade. But times have changed. Toronto’s condos are no longer providing substantial returns for short-term investors because population growth has eased and interest rates have risen. This is challenging the business models of condo builders.

Inflation in grocery prices picked up in 2025, largely due to rising cost pressures that emerged in late 2024 and worked their way through supply chains. Compared with the cost pressures experienced during the COVID‑19 pandemic, these have been more limited, narrower in scope and more commonly tied to imported items.

Hedge funds are active in Canadian government bond markets and help improve market efficiency. But their trading strategies are not well understood. We offer insights into the range of strategies hedge funds use beyond the more commonly known cash-futures basis trade. We also explore the concentration of trading activity among a few large funds.

We quantify the effects of large-scale stock purchases by a central bank and compare these to bond purchases. We find that the central bank’s equity purchases would lower the risk and term premiums on stocks and long-term bonds, respectively, and thereby stimulate economic activity.

This paper quantifies the contribution of sector-specific supply and demand shocks to personal consumption expenditure (PCE) inflation. It derives identification restrictions that are consistent with a large class of dynamic stochastic general equilibrium models with production networks.

Inflation expectations are important to monetary policy decision-makers. Using survey evidence, we examine how firms and consumers react to their inflation expectations during the post-pandemic period of high inflation.

We explore how many electronic funds transfer (EFT) systems can viably coexist within a jurisdiction at efficient scale by estimating the cost curve of the average EFT. We estimate the marginal cost to be approximately $0.55 per transaction, and the fixed cost to be approximately $83 million per year.