The authors examine the institutional and governance framework of modern central banks to determine whether there are lessons that can be applied to the International Monetary Funds' (IMF’s) institutional framework. Such a comparison is appealing for two reasons. First, both central banks and...

The authors present a detailed discussion of the Bank of Canadas' framework for the implementation of monetary policy. As background, they provide a brief overview of the financial system in Canada, including a discussion of the financial services industry and the money market. Key features of...

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...

Understanding the nature of credit risk has important implications for financial stability. Since authorities notably, central banks focus on risks that have systemic implications, it is crucial to develop ways to measure these risks. The difficulty lies in finding reliable measures of aggregate...

Relevant literature on asset-liability management (ALM) is reviewed and different ALM approaches are discussed that may be of interest to the Bank of Canada for the purpose of modelling the Exchange Fund Account (EFA). The author describes the general idea behind ALM, its pros and cons, risk...

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...

While a number of central banks publish their own business conditions indicators that rely on non-random sampling, knowledge about their statistical accuracy has been limited. Recently, de Munnik, Dupuis, and Illing (2009) made some progress in this area for the Bank of Canada's Business Outlook...

As part of managing a debt portfolio, debt managers face the challenging task of choosing a strategy that minimizes the cost of debt, subject to limitations on risk. The Bank of Canada provides debt-management analysis and advice to the Government of Canada to assist in this task, with the...

The recovery in private business investment globally remains extremely weak more than seven years after the financial crisis. This paper contributes to the ongoing policy debate on the factors behind this weakness by analyzing the role of growth prospects and uncertainty in explaining...

The 2007-09 global financial crisis has led policy-makers around the world, including central banks, to refocus their efforts to promote financial stability. As part of this process, central banks became quite active in supporting financial stability in a variety of ways, such as publicly...