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Forecasts of global economic activity and inflation are important inputs when conducting monetary policy in small open economies such as Canada. As part of the Bank of Canada's broad agenda to augment its short-term forecasting tools, the author constructs simple mixed-frequency forecasting equations for quarterly global output, imports, and inflation using the monthly global Purchasing Managers Index (PMI).

The author evaluates the effect of the Bank of Canada's conditional commitment regarding the target overnight rate on longer-term market interest rates by taking into account the relationship between interest rates, inflation, and unemployment rates.

This paper presents a dynamic general equilibrium model where asymmetric information about asset quality leads to asset illiquidity. Banking arises endogenously in this environment as banks can pool illiquid assets to average out their idiosyncratic qualities and issue liquid liabilities backed by pooled assets whose total quality is public information.

Based on a new approach for measuring the comovements between stock market returns, we provide a nonparametric test for asymmetric comovements in the sense that stock market downturns will lead to stronger comovements than market upturns.

Relevant literature on asset-liability management (ALM) is reviewed and different ALM approaches are discussed that may be of interest to the Bank of Canada for the purpose of modelling the Exchange Fund Account (EFA).

ToTEM – the Bank of Canada’s principal projection and policy-analysis model for the Canadian economy – is extended to include inventories. In the model, firms accumulate inventories of finished goods for their role in facilitating the demand for goods.

Inventory investment is an important component of the Canadian business cycle. Despite its small average size – less than 1 per cent of output – it exhibits volatile procyclical fluctuations, accounting for almost one-third of output variance.

This paper empirically assesses the effectiveness of the Bank of Canada's term Purchase and Resale Agreement (PRA) facility in reducing short-term bank funding pressures, as measured by the CDOR-OIS spread.

Using an error-correction model (ECM) framework, the authors attempt to quantify the degree of disequilibrium in Canadian housing stock over the period 1961–2008 for the national aggregate and over 1981–2008 for the provinces.

In a small open economy fluctuations in the real exchange rate can affect plant turnover, and thus aggregate productivity, by altering the makeup of plants that populate the market. An appreciation of the local currency increases the level of competition in the domestic market as import competition intensifies and export opportunities shrink, forcing less productive plants from the market and compelling new entrants to be more competitive than they otherwise would have been.