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One of the most important factors that must be considered if countries are thinking about lowering the target level of inflation much below 2 per cent is the zero interest bound. Targeting inflation rates that are too low, the authors note, may restrict the ability of monetary policy to respond to economic shocks by limiting the amount by which interest rates can be eased.

Dion examines the evolution of Canadian productivity since the mid-1990s, using the United States as a benchmark. During this period, trend productivity growth in Canada remained modest, whereas the U.S. witnessed a strong resurgence. Among the factors identified as potential root causes of Canada's lower productivity performance are a lower investment in information and communications technology, reallocation and adjustment costs associated with large relative price movements, and a weak demand for innovation.

The decline in safe real interest rates over the past three decades has reignited discussions on the neutral real interest rate, known as R*. We address the determinants and estimation methods of R*, as well as the factors influencing its decline and its future trajectory.

This paper reviews selectively the literature on exchange rate target zones and corresponding methodologies and examines whether they can be used to analyse the inflation-control problem.

To properly account for the dynamics of key macroeconomic variables, researchers incorporate various internal-propagation mechanisms in their models.

Using wavelets, the author estimates the fractional order of integration of a common long-run money-demand relationship whose parameters are obtained from a full-information maximum-likelihood procedure.

This paper studies the formation of consumers’ inflation expectations using micro-level data from the Michigan Survey. It shows that beyond the well-established socio-economic determinants of inflation expectations such as gender, income or education, other characteristics such as the households’ financial situation and their purchasing attitudes also matter.

The authors provide a detailed empirical analysis of Canadian city housing prices. They examine the long-run relationship between city house prices in Canada from 1981 to 2005 as well as idiosyncratic relations between city prices and city-specific variables.

The recent strengh of the U.S. economy and historically low rates of inflation have sparked considerable debate among economists and Federal Reserve officials. In order to better explain the recent behaviour of inflation, some observers have raised the concept of a non-accelerating inflation capacity utilization rate (NAICU). In this study, the author presents a new […]

Bank of Canada liquidity actions in response to the financial market turmoil; understanding corporate bond spreads using credit default swaps; review of the conflicts of interest between participants in the securitization process highlighting the most recent policy measures and potential solutions for ameliorating these agency issues.