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Many explanations for the decline in real interest rates over the last 30 years point to the role that population aging or rising income inequality plays in increasing the long-run aggregate demand for assets. Notwithstanding the importance of such factors, the starting point of this paper is to show that the major change driving household asset demand over this period is instead an increased desire—for a given age and income level—to hold assets.

This monthly newsletter features the latest research publications by Bank of Canada economists including external publications and working papers published on the Bank of Canada’s website.

In January 2002, officials from the Department of Finance and the Bank of Canada sought views of Government Securities Distributors and investors on a number of issues related to the domestic debt program as part of the development of the Debt Strategy 2002-03 and in keeping with the Government's ongoing commitment to consult with market […]

This paper brings novel insights into group coordination and price dynamics in complex environments. We implement a chaotic overlapping-generation model in the lab and find that group coordination is always on the steady state or on the two-cycle and that behavior is non-monotonic.

Since the Bank of Canada adopted inflation targeting in 1991, it has focused on a measure of core inflation as a shorter-term guide for monetary policy. When the targets were renewed in 2001, the Bank adopted CPIX as its measure of core inflation because of the advantages it offered. Leflèche and Armour review the experience with CPIX and whether the criteria used to select it in 2001 still favour the measure today. They describe the various measures of core inflation monitored by the Bank and evaluate them on the basis of the volatility of the components, the volatility of the core measures themselves, absence of bias relative to total CPI, predictive power, and certain practical criteria, including timeliness and credibility. They conclude that CPIX still satisfies all the empirical and practical criteria.

Although the current inflation-targeting regime has served Canadians well, sound public policy demands the continuous exploration of possible improvements in the monetary policy framework.

We assess how rising exports of US liquefied natural gas affect the convergence of natural gas prices worldwide. Our results may have implications for the development of future LNG export capacity in Canada.

Constrained efficient allocation (CE) is characterized in a model of adverse selection and directed search (Guerrieri, Shimer, and Wright (2010)). CE is defined to be the allocation that maximizes welfare, the ex-ante utility of all agents, subject to the frictions of the environment.

This paper evaluates the effects of high-frequency uncertainty shocks on a set of low-frequency macroeconomic variables that are representative of the U.S. economy. Rather than estimating models at the same common low-frequency, we use recently developed econometric models, which allows us to deal with data of different sampling frequencies.

Most models in finance assume that agents make trading plans over the infinite future. We consider instead that they are boundedly rational and may only form forecasts over a limited horizon.