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Chinese real export growth decelerated considerably during the last decade. This paper argues that the slowdown largely resulted from China moving to a more sophisticated mix of exports: China produced more sophisticated goods over which it had pricing power instead of producing greater volumes of less sophisticated products.

We examine the effects of monetary policy shocks on the Canadian housing market. Using high-frequency surprises around fixed announcement dates as an instrument in a Bayesian VAR, we estimate the responses of house prices, housing starts, building permits, resales, inventories, and mortgage purchases to a contractionary monetary policy shock. An increase in the policy rate leads to a substantial and persistent decline in average house prices. Housing starts and building permits fall, but their implied effects on the future housing stock are both slow and modest. Interpreted through the lens of market equilibrium, these results are most consistent with a stronger response of housing demand than housing supply.

The discrete choice to adopt a financial innovation affects a household’s exposure to inflation and transactions costs. We model this adoption decision as being subject to an unobserved cost.

This paper shows that real effective exchange rate (REER) regressions, the standard approach for estimating the response of aggregate exports to exchange rate changes, imply biased estimates of the underlying elasticities. We provide a new aggregate regression specification that is consistent with bilateral trade flows micro-founded by the gravity equation.

Economic growth in Canada is expected to average about 2 1/2 per cent in 2014 and 2015 before easing to around the 2 per cent growth rate of the economy’s potential in 2016.

This note introduces several market-based indicators and examines how they can further inform the Bank of Canada’s vulnerability assessment of Canadian financial institutions. Market-based indicators of leverage suggest that the solvency risk for major Canadian banks has increased since the beginning of the oil-price correction in the second half of 2014.

This paper develops a stress-testing framework in which banks strategically adjust their balance sheets in response to regulatory constraints and market conditions. Applied to Canada’s largest banks, it quantifies the effects of macroprudential policies on lending and identifies systemic vulnerabilities through reverse stress testing.

Portfolio-balance models of the yield curve are notoriously hard to estimate. This paper offers a simple, two-step estimation approach that can be implemented with standard term structure estimation methods. In our application to U.S. Treasury data, our method recovers economically interpretable drivers of the yield curve.

Every quarter, the Bank of Canada conducts quarterly consultations with businesses across Canada, referred to as the Business Outlook Survey (BOS). A principal-component analysis conducted by Pichette and Rennison (2011) led to the development of the BOS indicator, which summarizes survey results and is used by the Bank as a gauge of overall business sentiment.

Cryptoassets that reference a national currency (commonly known as stablecoins) aim to peg their value to the reference currency and typically use a reserve of traditional financial assets to maintain the peg. The market value of these fiat-referenced cryptoassets has grown more than thirtyfold between early 2020 and mid-2022. We explore some of their potential benefits and key risks.