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The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the need for policy-makers to closely monitor disruptions to the retail and food business sectors. We present a new method to measure business opening and closing rates using real-time data from Google Places, the dataset behind the Google Maps service.

Expected returns vary when investors face time-varying investment opportunities. Long-run risk models (Bansal and Yaron 2004) and no-arbitrage affine models (Duffie, Pan, and Singleton 2000) emphasize sources of risk that are not observable to the econometrician.

We study the trading dynamics in an asset market where the quality of assets is private information of the owner and finding a counterparty takes time. When trading of a financial asset ceases in equilibrium as a response to an adverse shock to asset quality, a large player can resurrect the market by buying up lemons which involves assuming financial losses.

As a guide for the conduct of monetary policy, most central banks make use of a trend inflation index similar to that employed by the Bank of Canada: the CPI excluding food, energy, and the effect of indirect taxes. In addition to their basic reference index, some central banks regularly publish statistical measures of the trend rate of inflation. The method used for producing these measures is, for the most part, based on the hypothesis that extreme price fluctuations generally reflect temporary shocks to the inflation rate, rather than its underlying trend. In this paper, the author offers a broad survey of studies on the measurement of trend inflation that have been published by the Bank of Canada and presents the results of the most recent work on the subject. Particular attention is paid to two statistical measures that the Bank follows more closely than other measures; namely, the CPIX, a price index that excludes eight of the most volatile CPI components, and CPIW, a measure that retains all the components of the overall index but gives a lower weighting to the most volatile.

This paper studies the cost of limited commitment when a central bank has the discretion to adjust policy whenever the costs of honoring its past commitments become high. Specifically, we consider a central bank that seeks to implement optimal policy in a New Keynesian model by committing to a price-level target path.

According to the rent-extraction hypothesis, weak corporate governance allows entrenched CEOs to capture the pay-setting process and benefit from events outside of their control – get paid for luck.

In this report, the authors examine and compare twelve private and public sector models of the Canadian economy with respect to their paradigm, structure, and dynamic properties. These open-economy models can be grouped into two economic paradigms.

Éric Chouinard and Graydon Paulin review the progress to date in implementing Basel III, the new framework of global regulatory standards for the banking sector developed by the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision. The report highlights the expected net benefits of implementing Basel III, as well as the challenges in ensuring international consistency in measuring the risk-weighted capital of banks. It includes a discussion on how implementing Basel III has affected the banking system in Canada and other important jurisdictions, and demonstrates the need for ongoing assessment of the effects on the financial system and the macroeconomy.

This document provides information about the functions, programs, activities and related information holdings of government institutions subject to the Access to Information Act and the Privacy Act.

The COVID-19 pandemic significantly increased the demand for cash. Cash in circulation increased sharply from March through December 2020, particularly in the early months of this period. Although use of electronic methods of payment also increased significantly, cash use for payments remains high for low-value transactions and among certain demographic groups.