Technical Reports

• The Canadian Banking System

  Technical Report No. 81 Charles Freedman

  This paper examines the major changes in the Canadian banking system since the Second World War, with special attention paid to the differences between Canadian and U.S. developments over this period.

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Technical reports Topic(s): Financial institutions JEL Code(s): G, G2

• Constraints on the Conduct of Canadian Monetary Policy in the 1990s: Dealing with Uncertainty in Financial Markets

  Technical Report No. 80 Kevin Clinton, Mark Zelmer

  Canada's economic performance in the first half of the 1990s was adversely affected by high premiums in interest rates that were brought on by political and economic uncertainties.

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Technical reports Topic(s): Monetary policy and uncertainty, Monetary policy implementation, Monetary policy transmission JEL Code(s): E, E5, E58

• Measurement of the Output Gap: A Discussion of Recent Research at the Bank of Canada

  Technical Report No. 79 Pierre St-Amant, Simon van Norden

  In this paper, we discuss some methodologies for estimating potential output and the output gap that have recently been studied at the Bank of Canada. The assumptions and econometric techniques used by the different methodologies are discussed in turn, and applications to Canadian data are presented.

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Technical reports Topic(s): Potential output JEL Code(s): D, D2, D24

• Do Mechanical Filters Provide a Good Approximation of Business Cycles?

  Technical Report No. 78 Alain Guay, Pierre St-Amant

  In this paper, the authors examine how well the Hodrick-Prescott filter (HP) and the band-pass filter recently proposed by Baxter and King (BK) extract the business-cycle component of macroeconomic time series.

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Technical reports Topic(s): Econometric and statistical methods JEL Code(s): C, C5, C52, E, E3, E32

• The Bank of Canada's New Quarterly Projection Model, Part 4. A Semi-Structural Method to Estimate Potential Output: Combining Economic Theory with a Time-Series Filter

  Technical Report No. 77 Leo Butler

  The level of potential output plays a central role in the Bank of Canada's new Quarterly Projection Model (QPM). This report, the fourth in a series documenting QPM, describes a general method to measure potential output, as well as its implementation in the QPM system.

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Technical reports Topic(s): Economic models JEL Code(s): C, C5, C51, E, E2, E23

• Excess Volatility and Speculative Bubbles in the Canadian Dollar: Real or Imagined?

  Technical Report No. 76 John Murray, Simon van Norden, Robert Vigfusson

  Greater intervention by the public sector is often proposed as a solution to the increased speculation and excessive price volatility thought to characterize today's competitive world financial system.

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Technical reports Topic(s): Exchange rates JEL Code(s): C, C4, C40, F, F3, F31

• The Bank of Canada's New Quarterly Projection Model, Part 3. The Dynamic Model: QPM

  Technical Report No. 75 Donald Coletti, Benjamin Hunt, David Rose, Robert Tetlow

  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.

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Technical reports Topic(s): Economic models JEL Code(s): C, C5, C53, E, E1, E17

• The Electronic Purse: An Overview of Recent Developments and Policy Issues

  Technical Report No. 74 Gerald Stuber

  Futurists have been speculating about the prospects for a cashless society for many years, and such predictions became more frequent following the introduction of "smart" cards - cards containing a computer chip - in the mid-1970s.

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Technical reports Topic(s): Digital currencies and fintech, Financial institutions, Payment clearing and settlement systems, Recent economic and financial developments JEL Code(s): E, E4, E41, G, G2, G20

• The Bank of Canada's New Quarterly Projection Model, Part 2. A Robust Method for Simulating Forward-Looking Models

  Technical Report No. 73 John Armstrong, Richard Black, Douglas Laxton, David Rose

  In this report, we describe methods for solving economic models when expectations are presumed to have at least some element of consistency with the predictions of the model itself. We present analytical results that establish the convergence properties of alternative solution procedures for linear models with unique solutions. Only one method is guaranteed to converge, […]

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Technical reports Topic(s): Economic models JEL Code(s): C, C3, C32, C5, C53

• The Bank of Canada's New Quarterly Projection Model, Part 1. The Steady-State Model: SSQPM

  Technical Report No. 72 Richard Black, Douglas Laxton, David Rose, Robert Tetlow

  This report is the first documenting the Bank of Canada's new model of the Canadian economy, the Quarterly Projection Model (QPM). QPM is used at the Bank of Canada for both economic projections and policy analysis. Here the authors focus on the model's long-run properties, describing SSQPM, a model of the steady state of QPM […]

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Technical reports Topic(s): Economic models JEL Code(s): C, C5, C51, E, E1, E13