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The Canadian economy continues to operate just above its full production capacity, and the near-term outlook for core inflation has moved slightly higher.

Over the past year, Canada’s economy has outperformed the economies of virtually all the other major industrial countries.

We study the formation of price bubbles on experimental asset markets where cash earns interest. There are two main conclusions.

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

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

We study the importance of supply constraints in explaining the heterogeneity in house price cycles across geographies in the United States.

We study how the distribution of information supply by the news media affects the macroeconomy. We find that media coverage focuses particularly on the largest firms, and that firms’ equity financing and investment increase after media coverage. But these equity and investment responses are largest among small, rarely covered firms. Our quantitative studies highlight that the aggregate effects of media coverage depend crucially on how that coverage is allocated.

We propose an open-economy New Keynesian model with financial integration that allows financial intermediaries to hold foreign long-term bonds. We study the implications of financial integration on monetary policy transmission. Among various aspects of financial integration, the bond duration plays a major role. These results hold for conventional and unconventional monetary policies.

We introduce behavioral learning equilibria (BLE) into DSGE models with boundedly rational agents using simple but optimal first order autoregressive forecasting rules. The Smets-Wouters DSGE model with BLE is estimated and fits well with inflation survey expectations. As a policy application, we show that learning requires a lower degree of interest rate smoothing.

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.