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We present a novel database of real-time data and forecasts from the Bank of Canada’s staff economic projections. We then provide a forecast evaluation for GDP growth and CPI inflation since 1982: we compare the staff forecasts with those from commonly used time-series models estimated with real-time data and with forecasts from other professional forecasters and provide standard bias tests.

Because the Bank of Canada has started withdrawing monetary stimulus, monitoring the transmission of these changes to monetary policy will be important. Subcomponents of consumption and housing will likely respond differently to a monetary policy tightening, both in terms of the aggregate effect and timing.

We document a strong asymmetry in the evolution of federal funds rate expectations and map this observed asymmetry into measures of monetary policy uncertainty. We show that periods of monetary policy tightening and easing are distinctly related to downside (policy rate is higher than expected) and upside (policy rate is lower than expected) uncertainty.

This paper studies the effects of financial development, taking into account both formal and informal financing. Using cross-country firm-level data, we document that informal financing is utilized more by rich countries than poor countries.

We build upon new developments in the international trade literature to construct a quantitative Ricardian framework similar to Caliendo and Parro (2015) to isolate and estimate the long-run economic impacts of tariff changes.

We use the Terms-of-Trade Economic Model (ToTEM) to conduct demand- and supply-driven simulations, both of which deliver weakness in Canadian non-commodity exports relative to foreign activity in line with recent data.

This note examines supply-side trends in Canadian non-energy industries and their implications for export performance. Between 2002 and 2016, capital stocks and total labour input declined in many industries that export non-energy goods. These soft trends in the factors of production have likely contributed to the decline in non-energy exports in about half of the goods industries analyzed in this note.

Building on the shift-share analysis of Barnett and Charbonneau (2015), this note decomposes Canada’s market shares in the United States, Europe and China for imports of non-energy goods into competitiveness, preference shifts and an interaction term. We find that, despite the depreciation of the dollar, Canada continued to lose market share over 2014–17 (around 0.4 percentage points lost per year on average over four years).

This note summarizes the key findings from Bank of Canada staff analytical work examining the reasons for the recent weakness in Canadian non-energy exports. Canada steadily lost market share in US non-energy imports between 2002 and 2017, mostly reflecting continued and broad-based competitiveness losses.

We document that, across households, the money consumption ratio increases with age and decreases with consumption, and that there has been a large increase in the money consumption ratio during the recent era of very low interest rates. We construct an overlapping generations (OLG) model of money holdings for transaction purposes subject to age (older households use more money), cohort (younger generations are exposed to better transaction technology), and time effects (nominal interest rates affect money holdings).