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The authors estimate a small monthly macroeconometric model (BEAM, for bonds, equity, and money) of the Canadian economy built around three cointegrating relationships linking financial and real variables over the 1975–2002 period.

This equilibrium model explains the trend in long-term yields and business-cycle movements in short-term yields and yield spreads. The less-frequent inverted yield curves (and less-frequent recessions) after the 1990s are due to recent secular stagnation and procyclical inflation expectations.

Interest rates in China are composed of a mix of both market-determined interest rates (interbank rates and bond yields), and regulated interest rates (retail lending and deposit rates), reflecting China’s gradual process of interest rate liberalization.

Monte Carlo evidence has made it clear that asymptotic tests based on generalized method of moments (GMM) estimation have disappointing size. The problem is exacerbated when the moment conditions are serially correlated.

This is the first in a series of semi-annual reports by the Bank of Canada on Canadian monetary policy.

Product standards are omnipresent in industrialized societies. Though standardization can be beneficial for domestic producers, divergent product standards have been categorized as a major obstacle to international trade. This paper quantifies the effect of standard harmonization on trade flows and characterizes the extent to which it changes the cost and demand structure of exporting.

How can policy-makers avoid large policy errors when they are uncertain about the true model of the economy?

In this paper known results about the equivalence of state space and autoregressive moving-average models with exogenous inputs (ARMAX) (including vector auto-regressive or VAR models) are reviewed. While most of these results are not new, no single reference appears to bring together several important related points.

Using two complementary approaches, we investigate the importance of U.S. macroeconomic news in driving low-frequency fluctuations in the term structure of interest rates in Canada, Sweden and the United Kingdom. We find that U.S. macroeconomic news is particularly important to explain changes in the expectation components of the nominal, real and break-even inflation rates of small open economies.

This Report outlines recent developments in the Canadian economy that affect the rate of inflation and provides an account of the measures taken by the Bank of Canada to control inflation.