A central bank's main concern is the general direction of future inflation, and not transitory fluctuations of the inflation rate. As a result, this paper is concerned with forecasting a simple measure of the trend of inflation, the eight-quarter CPI-inflation rate. The primary objective is to...

The generation and implementation of ideas, or knowledge, is crucial for economic performance. We study this process in a model of endogenous growth with frictions. Productivity increases with knowledge, which advances via innovation, and with the exchange of ideas from those who generate them...

This paper reviews some recent developments in digital currency, focusing on platform-sponsored currencies such as Facebook Credits. In a model of platform management, we find that it will not likely be profitable for such currencies to expand to become fully convertible competitors to...

This paper studies the efficiency of financial intermediation through securitization in a model with heterogeneous investment projects and asymmetric information about the quality of securitized assets. I show that when retaining part of the risk, the issuer of securitized assets may credibly...

In this report, the authors examine and compare twelve private and public sector models of the Canadian economy with respect to their paradigm, structure, and dynamic properties. These open-economy models can be grouped into two economic paradigms. The first is the "conventional" paradigm (or...

Estimating potential output and the output gap - the difference between actual output and its potential - is important for the proper conduct of monetary policy. However, the measurement and interpretation of potential output, and hence the output gap, is fraught with uncertainty, since it is...

The authors use simulations within the BoC-GEM-FIN, the Bank of Canada’s version of the Global Economy Model with financial frictions in both the demand and supply sides of the credit market, to investigate the macroeconomic implications of changing bank regulations on the Canadian economy....

Using BoC-GEM-Fin, a large-scale DSGE model with real, nominal and financial frictions featuring a banking sector, we explore the macroeconomic implications of various types of countercyclical bank capital regulations. Results suggest that countercyclical capital requirements have a significant...

The authors propose a monetary policy rule for the Terms-of-Trade Economic Model (ToTEM), the Bank of Canada's new projection and policy-analysis model for the Canadian economy. They consider simple instrument rules such as Taylor-type and inflation-forecast-based rules. The proposed rule...

In recent years, there has been a lot of interest in Taylor-type rules. Evidence in the literature suggests that Taylor-type rules are optimal in a number of models and are fairly robust across different models. The reaction function in the Bank of Canada's Quarterly Projection Model (QPM) is an...