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The aims of this study are to examine how liquidity in the Government of Canada securities market has evolved over the 1990s and to determine what factors influence the level of liquidity in this market, with some comparisons to the U.S. Treasury securities market. We find empirical support for the hypothesis that an increase in […]

Theory and empirical evidence suggest that the term structure of interest rates reflects risk premiums as well as market expectations about future inflation and real interest rates. We propose an approach to extracting such premiums and expectations by exploiting both the comovements among interest rates across the yield curve and between two countries, Canada and […]

This paper examines the impact of a collapsing exchange rate regime on output in an open economy in which shocks to capital flows and exports predominate. A sticky-price rational expectations model is used to compare the variability of output under the collapsing regime to that under alternative fixed and flexible regimes. Output is found to […]

In this paper we measure potential output (and consequently the output gap) using state-space models. Given that the estimated output gap is used as an indicator to measure the extent of inflationary pressures in the economy, we evaluate the use of such models for the implementation of monetary policy. Our starting point is the Gerlach […]

This paper examines the implications of changes in economic behaviour for simple inflation-forecast–based monetary rules of the type currently used at two inflation-targeting central banks. Three types of changes in economic behaviour are considered, changes that are motivated by developments in monetary and fiscal policy in the 1990s: changes in monetary policy credibility, changes in […]

The relationships among the quantity theory of money, monetarism and policy regimes based on money-growth and inflation targeting are briefly discussed as a prelude to an exposition of alternative views of money's role in the transmission mechanism of monetary policy. The passive-money view treats the money supply as an endogenous variable that plays no role […]

This paper studies the implications of certain kinds of uncertainty for monetary policy. It first describes the optimum policy rule in a simple model of the transmission mechanism as in Ball and Svensson.

It is a mistake to debate the merits of alternative exchange rate regimes for Canada independently of other features of the monetary order. A coherent order requires a well-defined goal for monetary policy, one that the authorities are capable of achieving, and that anchors private sector expectations. For it to be liberal, the relevant authorities […]

This paper assesses the effectiveness of Canada's official foreign exchange intervention in moderating intraday volatility of the Can$/US$ exchange rate, using a 2-1/2-year sample of 10-minute exchange rate data. The use of high frequency data (higher than daily frequency) should help in assessing the impact of intervention since the foreign exchange market is efficient and […]

The primary objective of this paper is to produce a framework that could be used to construct a historical data base of zero-coupon and forward yield curves estimated from Government of Canada securities' prices.