The Canadian financial industry continues to experience significant changes. This report provides an update on recent developments and re-examines a number of issues facing financial service providers that were identified in Technical Report No. 82. In particular, this report highlights the role...

The primary objective of this paper is to produce a framework that could be used to construct a historical data base of zero-coupon and forward yield curves estimated from Government of Canada securities' prices. The secondary objective is to better understand the behaviour of a class of...

The analysis and forecasting of developments in the U.S. economy have always played a critical role in the formulation of Canadian economic and financial policy. Thus, the Bank places considerable importance on generating internal forecasts of U.S. economic activity as an input to the Canadian...

In this paper, the authors examine how weel the Hodrick-Prescott filter (HP) and the band-pass filter recently proposed by Baxter and King (BK) extract the business-cycle component of macroeconomic time series.

This paper examines the behaviour of the Canadian dollar from 1997 to 1999 to see if there is any evidence of excess volatility or significant overshooting. A small econometric model of the exchange rate, based on market fundamentals, is presented and used to make tentative judgments about the...

Futurists have been speculating about the prospects for a cashless society for many years, and such predictions became more frequent following the introduction of "smart" cards -­ cards containing a computer chip -­ in the mid-1970s. One smart-card application of particular interest to central...

In this paper, we discuss some methodologies for estimating potential output and the output gap that have recently been studied at the Bank of Canada. The assumptions and econometric techniques used by the different methodologies are discussed in turn, and applications to Cnadian data are presented.

The authors provide a detailed technical description of the Terms-of-Trade Economic Model (ToTEM), which replaced the Quarterly Projection Model (QPM) in December 2005 as the Bank's principal projection and policy-analysis model for the Canadian economy. ToTEM is an open-economy, dynamic...

The Bank of Canada uses core CPI inflation, the year-over-year rate of change of the consumer price index excluding food, energy, and the effects of changes in indirect taxes, as the operational guide for monetary policy. In this report we study the concept and measurement of core or underlying...

To complement its existing set of tools to analyze and forecast developments in the global economy, the Bank of Canada recently developed a version of the Global Projection Model (GPM) jointly with staff at the International Monetary Fund. The GPM is a highly stylized quarterly projection model...