Search

This is the second in a series of semi-annual reports designed to increase the transparency and understanding of Canadian monetary policy.

The five articles in this issue present research and analysis by Bank staff covering a variety of topics: the growth of Canadian-dollar-denominated assets in official foreign reserves; the emergence of platform-based digital currencies; methods of forecasting the real price of oil; measures of uncertainty in monetary policy; and the recent performance of the labour market in Canada and the United States.

Modeling and estimating persistent discrete data can be challenging. In this paper, we use an autoregressive panel probit model where the autocorrelation in the discrete variable is driven by the autocorrelation in the latent variable. In such a non-linear model, the autocorrelation in an unobserved variable results in an intractable likelihood containing high-dimensional integrals.

The official Chinese labour market indicators have been seen as problematic, given their small cyclical movement and their only-partial capture of the labour force. In our paper, we build a monthly Chinese labour market conditions index (LMCI) using text analytics applied to mainland Chinese-language newspapers over the period from 2003 to 2017.

The exponential family, relative entropy, and distortion are methods of transforming probability distributions. We establish a link between those methods, focusing on the relation between relative entropy and distortion.

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.

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.

The authors examine how the use of extreme value theory yields collateral requirements that are robust to extreme fluctuations in the market price of the asset used as collateral.

Over the last six months, most countries have continued to register strong economic growth.

The Canadian economy regained strong momentum in 1999 as the U.S. economy remained vigorous, the global economy recovered, and commodity prices moved upwards.