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In the year just ended, the global economy faced a number of exceptional challenges, reflecting a wide range of economic, financial, and geopolitical risks and uncertainties. These included the fallout from the September 2001 terrorist attacks, corporate accounting scandals, stock market volatility, and developments in the Middle East. Despite this global backdrop, the Canadian economy outperformed virtually all other industrial economies, growing by about 3 1/4 per cent and creating 560,000 jobs, while inflation expectations remained well anchored to the Bank of Canada’s 2 per cent inflation-control target.

Should managers be paid in stock options if they provide stock-market participants with information about the firm? This paper studies how firm owners trade off the benefit of stock-price incentives and better-informed market participants against the cost of potential stock-price manipulation.

At the time of the November 2000 Monetary Policy Report, although signs of the anticipated slowing of the U.S. economy were becoming apparent, the momentum of the global economy was considered strong.

We develop a model with firm heterogeneity in importing and cross-border shopping among consumers. Exchange-rate appreciations lower the cost of imported goods, but also lead to more cross-border shopping; hence, the net impact on aggregate retail prices and sales is ambiguous.

With inflation remaining low for the sixth consecutive year, the Canadian economy recorded a strong expansion of about 4 per cent through 1997.

We develop a principal-agent model of cyber-attacking with fee-paying clients who delegate security decisions to financial platforms. We derive testable implications about clients’ vulnerability to cyber attacks and about the fees charged.

The Canadian economy continues to adjust to developments in the global economy.

This paper relaxes the Bayesian Nash equilibrium (BNE) assumption commonly imposed in empirical discrete choice games with incomplete information. Instead of assuming that players have unbiased/correct expectations, my model treats a player’s belief about the behavior of other players as an unrestricted unknown function. I study the joint identification of belief and payoff functions.

Two major issues dominate the analysis and policy discussion in this Monetary Policy Report: the nature and extent of the global economic slowdown that began late last year and the consequences of the terrorist attacks in the United States.

Since the May Report, the international economic environment has continued to improve. Economic activity abroad grew faster than expected, while inflation in the major economies remained subdued.