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Chargex

The artefacts on the cover are part of the National Currency Collection of the Bank of Canada.

Photography by Gord Carter

Nonresponse is a considerable challenge in the Retailer Survey on the Cost of Payment Methods conducted by the Bank of Canada in 2015. There are two types of nonresponse in this survey: unit nonresponse, in which a business does not reply to the entire survey, and item nonresponse, in which a business does not respond to particular questions within the survey.

We propose a macroeconomic model with a nonlinear Phillips curve that has a flat slope when inflationary pressures are subdued and steepens when inflationary pressures are elevated. Our model can generate more sizable inflation surges due to cost-push and demand shocks than a standard linearized model when inflation is high.

The uncertainty around future changes to the Federal Reserve target rate varies over time. In our results, the main driver of uncertainty is a “path” factor signaling information about future policy actions, which is filtered from federal funds futures data.

Central banks in many advanced economies enjoy a high degree of independence, which protects monetary policy decisions from political influence. But how should independent central banks react if pressured by fiscal policy-makers? We examine whether a central bank should design a monetary policy framework that prescribes acting conditionally on how fiscal policy behaves.

We estimate a model of households in Norway with bequest motives, health-dependent utility, and uncertain longevity and health. Our estimates imply strong bequest motives for households both with and without offspring. We interpret this as suggestive evidence that utility from residual wealth represents forces beyond an altruistic bequest motive.

We propose a new empirical framework that jointly decomposes the conditional variance of economic time series into a common and a sector-specific uncertainty component. We apply our framework to a disaggregated industrial production series for the US economy. We identify unexpected changes in durable goods uncertainty as drivers of downturns, while unexpected hikes in non-durable goods uncertainty are expansionary.

At the Bank of Canada, we have worked hard over the past several years to define our goals and our methods for achieving them. We have continued to strengthen our monetary policy framework, and we have established priorities in all areas of our operations to help us meet our strategic objectives. In 2002, the Bank set out a medium-term plan for the period 2003–05. The plan’s clearly defined policy frameworks and priorities were critical in guiding our analysis and our decisions in 2003, a year in which Canadians across the country were affected by a number of severe and unanticipated events.

This study introduces a new method for identifying the output gap, based on the estimation of multivariate autoregression (VAR) models. This approach, which involves using restrictions to identify structural shocks that have only a transitory effect on output but that affect the trend inflation rate, is compared with the decomposition method proposed by Blanchard and […]

We study how the transmission of monetary policy innovations is affected by the endogenous response of the central bank to macroeconomic aggregates in a two-agent New Keynesian model. We focus on how the stance of monetary policy and the fraction of savers in the economy affect transmission.