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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.

Canada’s financial system is resilient. Overall, households, businesses, banks and non-bank financial intermediaries successfully weathered the pandemic, a period of elevated inflation, and sharp increases in interest rates. But the trade war currently threatens the Canadian economy and poses risks to financial stability.

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.

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.

For the five overseas countries considered in this study (Germany, France, Italy, the United Kingdom and Japan), data on real GDP are released on a quarterly basis at least two months after the end-of-quarter.

Using a general equilibrium model with nominal rigidities and financial frictions, we explore whether introducing a central bank digital currency (CBDC) affects the transmission of monetary policy, and how the effects depend on CBDC design features. We also study whether paying interest on central bank liabilities is contractionary or expansionary.

This is the fourth of the Financial Markets Department’s descriptions of Canadian financial industrial organization. The paper discusses the organization of the securities lending market in Canada. We outline key characteristics of securities lending contracts, participants in the securities lending market, the market infrastructures that support securities lending activities, and aggregated statistics describing the Canadian market.

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.

Proceedings of a Conference Co-sponsored by the New York Association for Business Economics and the Canadian Consulate General in New York, February 2006 (papers in unedited, electronic format only)

This paper proposes a new bootstrap procedure for mean squared errors of robust small-area estimators. We formally prove the asymptotic validity of the proposed bootstrap method and examine its finite sample performance through Monte Carlo simulations.