Browse research

The days when secrecy and opacity were the bywords of central banking are gone. The advent of inflation targeting in the early 1990s acted as the catalyst for enhanced transparency and communications in the conduct of monetary policy.

The recent financial crisis and subsequent recession have spurred great interest in the sources of unemployment fluctuations. Previous studies predominantly assume a single economy-wide labour market, and therefore abstract from differences across sectorspecific labour markets in the economy.

Commodity-equity and cross-commodity return co-movements rose dramatically after the 2008 financial crisis. This development took place following what has been dubbed the “financialization” of commodity markets.

The process that the Bank of Canada follows to make its monetary policy decisions has evolved over time. This process is very information-intensive and collaborative, drawing on the expertise, judgment and analysis of many people. This article describes monetary policy decision making at the Bank, and discusses some common misconceptions about monetary policy and the process.

This article focuses on a quantitative method to identify financial system vulnerabilities, specifically, an imbalance indicator model (IIM) and its application to Canada. An IIM identifies potential vulnerabilities in a financial system by comparing current economic and financial data with data from periods leading up to past episodes of financial stress. It complements other sources of information - including market intelligence and regular monitoring of the economy - that policy-makers use to assess vulnerabilities.

Changes in technology and regulation have resulted in an increasing number of trading venues in equity markets in Canada. New trading platforms have intensified price competition and have encouraged innovation, and they do not appear to have segmented trade. But the increasingly complex market structure has necessitated investments in expensive technology and has introduced new operational risks. Regulatory responses should be carefully adapted to retain the competition and innovation associated with this market fragmentation.

This paper reviews some recent developments in digital currency, focusing on platform-sponsored currencies such as Facebook Credits.

We measure uncertainty surrounding the central bank’s future policy rates using implied volatility computed from interest rate option prices and realized volatility computed from intraday prices of interest rate futures.

This report provides a detailed technical description of an updated version of the Terms-of-Trade Economic Model (ToTEM II), which replaced ToTEM (Murchison and Rennison 2006) in June 2011 as the Bank of Canada’s quarterly projection model for Canada.

A large body of empirical literature investigates differences in financing structures across firms. Private firms’ financing receives little attention due to the lack of data.