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The year that just passed posed many challenges for all Canadians. The slowdown in the global economy became more pronounced as the year went on, and this affected households, businesses, and governments alike. The tragedy of 11 September compounded the economic difficulties and issues facing us all. Through this period of rapidly changing circumstances, the Bank met its responsibilities by responding quickly and vigorously to events in order to underpin confidence and support the economy.

In 1996 inflation remained within the Bank’s target range but was subject to downward pressure. The low rate of inflation contributed to a major easing in monetary conditions, and interest rates reached their lowest level in 30 years.

The Canadian economy continues to adjust to major global developments.

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.

Exporters frequently change their market destinations. This paper introduces a new approach to identifying the drivers of these decisions over time. Analysis of customs data from China and the UK shows most changes are driven by demand rather than supply-related shocks.

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.

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.

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.

Our study aims to gain insight on financial stability and climate transition risk. We develop a methodological framework that captures the direct effects of a stressful climate transition shock as well as the indirect—or systemic—implications of these direct effects. We apply this framework using data from the Canadian financial system.