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In this issue, Bank researchers discuss inflation dynamics and global trade following the 2007–09 financial crisis. Other articles explore changes to the governance and regulation of the Canadian payments system and outline the banking services provided by the Bank of Canada. Finally, the results of the 2013 Methods-of-Payment Survey are presented.

Cover page

Siamese Gaming Tokens

The tokens pictured here are part of the National Currency Collection, Bank of Canada.
Photography by Gord Carter, Ottawa.

We compare the determinants of consumer inflation expectations in the US and Canada by analyzing two current surveys. We find that Canadian consumers rely more on professional forecasts and the history of actual inflation when forming their expectations, while US consumers rely more on their own lagged expectations.

We use a small open economy model with overlapping generations to evaluate secular dynamics of the neutral rate in Canada from 1980 to 2018. We find that changes in both foreign and domestic factors resulted in a protracted decline in the neutral rate.

We find that minority households see greater declines in housing returns and entries into homeownership than White households after a tightening of monetary policy. Our findings emphasize the unintended consequences of monetary policy on racial inequality in the housing market.

The number of job gains and losses across firms in Canada each year is roughly one-fifth the total number of jobs and generally occurs within sectors (industries) rather than across sectors. Since labour reallocation within sectors has been strongly related to productivity growth in Canada, defining the key drivers of this type of reallocation is important, given the higher rates of reallocation and productivity growth in the Untied States than in Canada. This article finds that the appreciation of the Canadian dollar and rising commodity prices led to above-average reallocation of labour across sectors over the 2005-08 period, but that the impact on productivity has been minor. Labour reallocation across firms, however, generates substantial labour productivity gains in manufacturing and the business sector as a whole.

Examination of how, when the policy interest rate is at or near zero, different monetary policy frameworks might help to lower the risk and economic cost of such a scenario; review of the findings of recent Bank of Canada research on the relative merits of inflation targeting and price-level targeting (PLT) for a small open economy; examination of monetary policy being used to counteract financial imbalances; conference summary: new frontiers in monetary policy design.

Can regulators keep pace with banks’ creative regulatory workarounds? Our analysis unpacks the trade-offs between fixed regulations and crisis-triggered rules, showing that the latter are especially prone to circumvention—and can trigger larger, costlier bailouts.

Central banks are still defining their approach to financial stability and are at an early stage in the development of useful models. The Bank of Canada's 2007 economic conference was organized to stimulate progress in the development of financial-stability frameworks. Among the highlights reported here are the discussions centred around three proposed frameworks: a contingent-claims-analysis framework, a semi-structural framework, and structural financial-stability models. Participants also reported on their experiences with stress-testing under the International Monetary Fund's Financial Sector Assessment Program and discussed the implications for financial stability of linkages among payment, clearing, and settlement systems.