To investigate the extent to which the transparency of the Bank of Canada’s monetary policy has improved, the authors examine empirically – over the period 30 October 2000 to 31 May 2007 – the reaction of Canadian financial markets to official Bank communications, and in particular their...

The Canadian overnight repo market persistently shows signs of latent funding pressure around month-end periods. Both the overnight repo rate and Bank of Canada liquidity provision tend to rise in these windows. This paper proposes three non-mutually exclusive hypotheses to explain this...

The author evaluates the effect of the Bank of Canada's conditional commitment regarding the target overnight rate on longer-term market interest rates by taking into account the relationship between interest rates, inflation, and unemployment rates. By using vector autoregressive models of...

We analyze money financing of fiscal transfers (helicopter money) in two simple New Keynesian models: a "textbook" model in which all money is non-interest-bearing (e.g., all money is currency), and a more realistic model with interest-bearing reserves. In the textbook model with only...

During and after the Great Recession of 2008-09, conventional monetary policy in the United States and many other advanced economies was constrained by the effective lower bound (ELB) on nominal interest rates. Several central banks implemented large-scale asset purchase (LSAP) programs, more...

A measure of the neutral policy interest rate can be used to gauge the stance of monetary policy. We define the neutral rate as the real policy rate consistent with output at its potential level and inflation equal to target after the effects of all cyclical shocks have dissipated. This is a...

This paper presents Bank of Canada staff's current assessment of the US neutral rate, along with a newly developed set of models on which that assessment is based. The overall assessment is that the US neutral rate currently lies in a range of 1.75 to 2.75 percent. This represents a decline of...

The neutral rate of interest is an important concept and communication tool for central banks. We develop a small open economy model with overlapping generations to study the determinants of the neutral real rate of interest in a small open economy. The model captures domestic factors such as...

The decline in safe real interest rates over the past three decades has reignited discussions on the neutral real interest rate, known as R*. We review insights from the literature on R*, addressing its determinants and estimation methods, as well as the factors influencing its decline and its...