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We document countercyclical corporate saving behavior with the degree of countercyclicality varying nonmonotonically with firm size. We then develop a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model with heterogeneous firms to explain the pattern and study its implications for business cycles.

In this paper the authors show how potential output can be estimated and projected through an approach derived from the structural vector autoregression methodology. This approach is applied to the Mexican economy. To identify demand, supply and world oil shocks, the authors assume that demand shocks do not have a permanent effect on output and […]

Consumption inequality and a low interest rate environment are two important trends in today’s economy. But the implications they may have—and how those implications interact—within different monetary policy frameworks are not well understood. We study the ranking of alternative frameworks that take these trends into account.

This paper studies the sensitivity of Canadian producer prices to the Canada-U.S. exchange rate. Using a unique product-level price data set, we estimate and analyze the impact of movements in the exchange rate on both domestic and export producer prices.

This paper documents a link between the real and financial sides of the economy. We find that retail equity mutual fund flows in Canada are negatively related to current and past changes in a component of the prime and 5-year mortgage rates that is uncorrelated with government rates.

Using the prices of crude oil futures contracts, we construct the term structure of crude oil convenience yields out to one-year maturity. The crude oil convenience yield can be interpreted as the interest rate, denominated in barrels of oil, for borrowing a single barrel of oil, and it measures the value of storing crude oil over the borrowing period.

Beginning with a review of the adoption of inflation targeting in a broad group of countries, Paulin focuses on changes in the design of inflation-targeting frameworks in light of fifteen years of accumulated experience. Included in the discussion are the use of numerical targets and ranges, the policy horizon, supporting institutional policy structures, and communication, including the publication of forecasts. A recurring theme is how much flexibility an inflation-targeting regime allows. The article concludes that the changes made to the frameworks have been relatively modest since their adoption, but in concert with the improved credibility that has resulted from central banks meeting their inflation-control targets, they have allowed an increasingly nuanced response to economic shocks.

In this paper, we explore the link between stress in the domestic financial sector and the capital flight faced by countries in the 2008-9 global crisis. Both the timing of emergence of internal financial stress in developing economies, and the size of the peak-trough declines in the stock price indices was comparable to that in high income countries, indicating that there was no decoupling, even before Lehman Brothers’ demise.

The Bank of Canada continues to use the Bitcoin Omnibus Survey (BTCOS) to monitor trends in Canadians’ awareness, ownership and use of Bitcoin. The most recent iteration was conducted in late 2018, following an 85 percent decline in the price of Bitcoin throughout the year.