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The Canadian economy is currently in transition from a period of disinflation to one with a very low and relatively stable inflation rate. Against this background, the author asks whether reduced-form parameters should be expected to be invariant to changes in the inflation process. This raises two empirical issues. The first relates to whether shifts […]

We study the degree to which China’s 11th Five-Year Plan softens trade-offs between emissions and output. Our model suggests efficient regulation could have further increased aggregate productivity by 3.5% and output by 4.7% without any increase in aggregate emissions.

This volume explores money and the role it has played, and continues to play, in society, through the lens of Canada's National Currency Collection. The Collection is an extraordinary repository of coins, bank notes, and related paraphernalia from around the world. Soft cover, 124 pages (2008).

This paper examines the predictive content of the term structure of interest rates for economic activity in Canada. Recent papers for the United States and other countries find that the slope of the term structure is a very good predictor of output growth.

Risk assessment models are an important component of the Bank’s analytical tool kit for assessing the resilience of the financial system. We describe the Framework for Risk Identification and Assessment (FRIDA), a suite of models developed at the Bank of Canada to quantify the impact of financial stability risks to the broader economy and a range of financial system participants (households, businesses and banks).

We develop a heterogeneous firm macro model with private information and quantify the aggregate relevance of asymmetric information. We find that a spike in private information account for 40% of the decline in aggregate investment during the 2007-2009 financial crisis and made monetary stimulus significantly less effective.

The level of government debt in Canada relative to gross domestic product has risen steadily since the mid-1970s. Canada has not been alone in experiencing rising government indebtedness, but in comparison to other countries, Canada's debt load is now distinctly on the high side. The author reviews some of the effects of rising government debt levels on macroeconomic performance and provides some calculations aimed at illustrating their possible long-run impact on the Canadian economy. His analysis, which is based on a model of the Canadian economy used at the Bank of Canada, suggests that higher levels of government debt reduce both the level of output and the share of output that is available for domestic consumption. The central policy implication is that there are substantial benefits to halting the rise in government debt and thus preventing further erosion of consumption opportunities.

The Bank of Canada has played an integral role in Canadian society for 70 years. When the Bank opened its doors in the spring of 1935, this country was struggling to define itself and to survive the economic and social turmoil of the Great Depression. Like Canada’s economy, its central bank has evolved and grown over the years. It has faced critical challenges and embraced change. But the Bank’s mandate has not changed. It is now, as it was then, to provide an effective, national monetary authority for Canada.

There has recently been considerable discussion about the ability of inflation to facilitate the adjustment of prices and wages and thus enhance economic performance. The discussion centres on whether wages are downwardly rigid. Wages are said to be downwardly rigid if it is difficult for the wages of some workers to fall despite underlying supply and demand pressures for decreases. Some authors have suggested that if downward nominal wage rigidity is prevalent it would be desirable to select a positive rate of inflation as the target for monetary policy. In this article, the authors evaluate the wage-rigidity hypothesis. They first examine the empirical evidence to assess whether the degree of downward rigidity is significant in Canada. They then analyze some key assumptions of the wage-rigidity hypothesis and its implications for employment. They also look at the empirical evidence on whether the combination of downward wage rigidity and low inflation has reduced employment.

The Bank of Canada made changes to several of the tools that make up its framework for operations and liquidity provision. These changes came about after a comprehensive re-view of the framework and are designed to help the Bank better achieve its objectives of reinforcing the target for the overnight rate and supporting the well-functioning of Cana-dian financial markets under normal market conditions.