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We compare the Federal Reserve’s asset purchase programs with those implemented by the Bank of England and the Swedish Riksbank, and the Swiss National Bank’s reserve expansion program.

This paper presents two complementary approaches to estimating the appropriate quantity of settlement balances needed to effectively operate monetary policy under a floor system in Canada.

Growth has slowed in many emerging-market economies (EMEs) since the 2007–09 global financial crisis, reflecting both cyclical and structural factors. In this context, it will be in-creasingly important for EMEs to raise potential growth by maintaining steady progress on structural reforms. How do structural reforms generally support growth? What are the re-form priorities for EMEs over recent history and today? Finally, what will be the impact of planned structural reforms on potential output growth among the world’s larger EMEs? These are some of the questions considered by the authors.

In an increasingly digitalized world, issuers of private digital currency can weaken central banks’ ability to stabilize the economy. By continuing to make central bank money attractive as a payment instrument in a digital world, a central bank digital currency (CDBC) could help to maintain a country’s monetary sovereignty.

Starting with the winter 2007–08 survey, the results of two additional questions became included in the Business Outlook Survey (BOS) publication: the balance of opinion on past sales and the balance of opinion on credit conditions. This backgrounder briefly describes the two questions and presents the correlations between the responses and relevant economic data.

A basic neoclassical model of production is often used to assess the contribution of investment to output growth. In the model, investment raises the capital stock and output growth increases in proportion to the growth in capital.

This paper investigates the effect of oil price uncertainty on real economic activity using a quarterly VAR with stochastic volatility in mean. Stochastic volatility allows oil price uncertainty to vary separately from changes in the level of oil prices, and thus the impact of oil price uncertainty can be examined in a more flexible yet tractable way.

The financial crisis of 2007-09 and the subsequent extended period of historically low real interest rates have revived the question of whether economic agents are willing to take on more risk when interest rates remain low for a prolonged time period. This increased appetite for risk, which causes economic agents to search for investment assets and strategies that generate higher investment returns, has been called the risk-taking channel of monetary policy. Recent academic research on banks suggests that lending policies in times of low interest rates can be consistent with the existence of a risk-taking channel of monetary policy in Europe, South America, the United States and Canada. Specifically, studies find that the terms of loans to risky borrowers become less stringent in periods of low interest rates. This risk-taking channel may amplify the effects of traditional transmission mechanisms, resulting in the creation of excessive credit.

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Bus Transportation Tokens and Tickets

The pieces illustrated on the cover range in size from 12 mm to 38 mm in diameter or width. They form part of the National Currency Collection, Bank of Canada.

Photography by Gord Carter, Ottawa