Search

How does the supply of nominal government debt affect the macroeconomy? To answer this question, we propose a portfolio-balance model of the yield curve in which inflation is determined through an interest rate rule.

This paper looks at the role mortgage brokers play in helping borrowers generate quotes and qualify for credit. We find that, on average, borrowers that engage with a mortgage broker pay lower interest rates. However, in about 15% of cases, borrowers are steered towards longer amortizing mortgages than they would have chosen absent a broker. Since mortgages with longer amortization have higher total interest costs over the entire life of the mortgage, this steering is expensive.

How can we assess the quality of a forecast? We propose a new benchmark to evaluate forecasts of temporally aggregated series and show that the real price of oil is more difficult to predict than we thought.

The authors show that the widening of a foreign firm's U.S. investor base and the improved information environment associated with cross-listing on a U.S. exchange each have a separately identifiable effect on a firm's valuation.

The Bank of Canada's interest in fixed-income markets spans several of its functional areas of responsibility, including monetary policy, funds management, and financial system stability and efficiency. For that reason, the 2006 conference brought together top academics and central bankers from around the world to discuss leading-edge work in the field of fixed-income research. The papers and discussions cover such topics as the efficiency of fixed-income markets, price formation, the determinants of the yield curve, and volatility modelling. This article provides a short summary of each conference paper and the ensuing discussion.

The relative productivity gap between Canada and the United States is a controversial subject matter. One argument especially contentious in this debate stems from the belief that the gradual depreciation of the Canadian dollar over the last 20 years has been one of the determinants of the productivity gap.

We introduce a model to detect periods of extrapolative house price expectations across Canadian cities. The House Price Exuberance Indicator can be updated on a quarterly basis to support the Bank of Canada’s broader assessment of housing market imbalances.

Chief Operating Office Filipe Dinis outlines how the Bank is strengthening its cyber defenses and helping improve the financial system’s cyber resilience and its ability to recover quickly from attacks.

How does the transmission of monetary policy change when a central bank digital currency (CBDC) is introduced in the economy? Does CBDC design matter? We study these questions in a general equilibrium model with nominal rigidities, liquidity frictions, and a banking sector where commercial banks face a leverage constraint.

The answer as to whether there are gains from pooling real-time oil price forecasts depends on the objective. The approach of combining five of the leading forecasting models with equal weights dominates the strategy of selecting one model and using it for all horizons up to two years.