Search

We introduce limited information in monetary policy. Agents receive signals from the central bank revealing new information (“news") about the future evolution of the policy rate before changes in the rate actually take place. However, the signal is disturbed by noise.

Implications for signal extraction from specifying unobserved components (UC) models with correlated or orthogonal innovations have been well investigated. In contrast, the forecasting implications of specifying UC models with different state correlation structures are less well understood.

When financial system vulnerabilities are elevated, they can give rise to asymmetric risks to the economic outlook. To illustrate this, I consider the economic outlook presented in the Bank of Canada’s October 2017 Monetary Policy Report in the context of two key financial system vulnerabilities: high levels of household indebtedness and housing market imbalances.

This note presents a composite indicator of Canadian financial system vulnerabilities—the Vulnerabilities Barometer. It aims to complement the Bank of Canada’s vulnerabilities assessment by adding a quantitative and synthesized perspective to the more granular (distributional) analysis presented in the Financial System Review.

There has been tremendous discussion of Bitcoin, digital currencies and FinTech. However, there is limited empirical evidence of Bitcoin’s adoption and usage. We propose a methodology to collect a nationally representative sample using the Bitcoin Omnibus Survey (BTCOS) to track the ubiquity and usage of Bitcoin in Canada.

The Bank of Canada 2015 Retailer Survey on the Cost of Payment Methods faced low response rates and outliers in sample data for two of its retailer strata: chains and large independent businesses. This technical report investigates whether it is appropriate to combine these two strata to produce more accurate estimates of the total private cost to large businesses of the main payment methods.

We develop a simulation-based procedure to test for stock return predictability with multiple regressors. The process governing the regressors is left completely free and the test procedure remains valid in small samples even in the presence of non-normalities and GARCH-type effects in the stock returns.

Because commodity prices help determine Canada’s terms of trade, employment, income and, ultimately, inflation, it is important to understand what causes them to fluctuate. Since the early 1900s, there have been four commodity price supercycles—which we define as extended periods of boom and bust that can take decades to complete. Now in its downswing phase, the current supercycle started after growth in China and other emerging-market economies in the mid-1990s resulted in an unexpected demand shock. The extent of this downswing depends on numerous factors that are presently uncertain.

This paper shows point identification in first-price auction models with risk aversion and unobserved auction heterogeneity by exploiting multiple bids from each auction and variation in the number of bidders. The required exclusion restriction is shown to be consistent with a large class of entry models.

This paper considers the problem of estimating a linear model between two heavy-tailed variables if the explanatory variable has an extremely low (or high) value. We propose an estimator for the model coefficient by exploiting the tail dependence between the two variables and prove its asymptotic properties.