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Canadian housing imbalances have elevated shelter inflation as a driver of CPI, fueled by high house prices, mortgage costs, rents, supply constraints, and leverage. This note uses a model with housing supply and extrapolative expectations to assess whether monetary policy should incorporate or look through shelter inflation under demand and supply shocks.

We examine the effects of monetary policy shocks on the Canadian housing market. Using high-frequency surprises around fixed announcement dates as an instrument in a Bayesian VAR, we estimate the responses of house prices, housing starts, building permits, resales, inventories, and mortgage purchases to a contractionary monetary policy shock. An increase in the policy rate leads to a substantial and persistent decline in average house prices. Housing starts and building permits fall, but their implied effects on the future housing stock are both slow and modest. Interpreted through the lens of market equilibrium, these results are most consistent with a stronger response of housing demand than housing supply.

In this note we examine how monetary policy affects housing demand, supply and prices in Canada, and whether these effects vary with labour market conditions

We use Canadian data to examine how monetary policy affects house prices and the consumer price index for rent through exogenous changes in the mortgage interest rates. It finds that the price and rent impacts operate through various channels and that these impacts vary by region.

An economy with fixed amortization mortgages and borrowing-constrained consumers leads to the level of inflation targeted having real effects on home ownership, consumption, and debt. Using a life-cycle housing tenure choice model, we show that by front-loading real mortgage payments, higher inflation lowers steady-state home ownership and the mortgage-debt-to-income ratio.

We update an assessment of potential changes in payments that mortgage holders could face at renewal in 2025 and 2026. We use an enhanced dataset (RESL2) that provides a more accurate starting point for mortgage balances.

Our paper employs smartphone data to construct an improved cash access metric by accounting for both spatial agglomeration and households’ travel patterns. We find that incorporating trip-chaining into the travel metric could show that travel costs are from 15 to 25% less than not incorporating trip-chaining and that the biggest decrease is driven by rural residents.

This study updates our measure of Canadians' access to cash through automated banking machines and financial institution branches. We find that in 2023 overall access to cash remains stable, while rural Canadians continue having less access.

This paper introduces a subjective measure of cash accessibility in Canada, complementing existing distance-based metrics developed by Chen, O’Habib and Xiao (2023). Analyzing data from the 2023 Methods-of-Payment Survey, this study explores how Canadians perceive their ease of accessing cash from automated banking machines (ABMs) and financial institution branches.

The arrival of immigrants increases demand for housing and puts upward pressure on shelter prices. Using instrumental variables based on the ancestry composition of residents in US counties, we estimate the causal impact of immigration on local shelter prices.