Payment services offered by non-banks have flourished in recent years. The author provides an overview of the different kinds of non-bank retail payments schemes currently available in Canada, illustrating each by focusing on a specific example. Current players in the Canadian marketplace...

Canada played an important role in the postwar establishment of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), yet it was also the first major member to challenge the orthodoxy of the BrettonWoods par value system by abandoning it in 1950 in favour of a floating, market-determined exchange rate....

The authors examine the impact of the recent run-up in energy and non-energy commodity prices on the Canadian dollar. Using the Bank of Canadas' exchange rate equation, they find that the differences between the actual value of the Canadian exchange rate and the simulated values observed in 2007...

The proportion of assets held by the average Canadian firm in the form of cash has increased steadily since the early 1990s, and is now roughly twice as large as in 1990. The literature has established that the cash-holding behaviour of firms is highly correlated with financial constraints and...

The author constructs a measure of core inflation using a structural vector autoregression containing oil-price growth, output growth, and inflation. This macro-foundedʺ measure of inflation forecasts total inflation at least as well as other, atheoretical measures. -- Inflation and prices

Using the results of a survey on accepted means of payment, the authors examine merchant preferences and perceptions of retail payment reliability, risk, and costs; the share of each type of payment method over total sales; and the costs involved in accepting payments. Models are developed for...

Treating imports as intermediate inputs to domestic production, the author adopts the translog function approach to model real gross domestic income (GDI) in Canada over the 19612006 period. She explores the role of price ratios, such as terms of trade and the real effective exchange rate, in...

The author provides an overview of carbon markets and explains how emissions trading can be important in encouraging the reduction of CO2 emissions in an efficient manner. He describes the key steps in establishing a cap-and-trade system, and reviews the European experiences with emissions...

The authors provide an extensive review of the rapidly expanding research on productivity, both at the macro and micro levels. They focus primarily on papers written about Canada, but also draw on selected studies from other countries, especially the United States, where such work sheds...

The Large Value Transfer System (LVTS) for settling large payments, and CDSX for settling debt and equity trades, are two of the main settlement systems in Canada. They are closely linked; for example, at the end of the day the final CDSX payment obligations must settle on the Bank of Canada’s...