This report provides a detailed technical description of an updated version of the Terms-of-Trade Economic Model (ToTEM II), which replaced ToTEM (Murchison and Rennison 2006) in June 2011 as the Bank of Canada’s quarterly projection model for Canada. ToTEM has been improved along a number of...

Sampling units for the 2013 Methods-of-Payment Survey were selected through an approximate stratified random sampling design. To compensate for non-response and non-coverage, the observations are weighted through a raking procedure. The variance estimation of weighted estimates must take into...

Until recently, there have been few efforts to systematically measure and aggregate the nominal value of the different types of sovereign government debt in default. To help fill this gap, the Bank of Canada’s Credit Rating Assessment Group (CRAG) has developed a comprehensive database of...

Sample calibration is a procedure that utilizes sample and national-level demographic distribution information to weight survey participants. The objective of calibration is to weight the sample so that it is demographically representative of the target population. This technical report details...

The authors describe the key features of a new large-scale Canadian macroeconomic forecasting model developed over the past two years at the Bank of Canada. The new model, called LENS for Large Empirical and Semi-structural model, uses a methodology similar to the Federal Reserve Board’s...

This paper surveys the empirical literature on the benefits of low inflation emphasizing contributions since 1990. It follows the framework of a section in the Bank's 1990 Annual Report, "The Benefits of Price Stability." This framework looks at the costs of inflation, or the benefits of price...

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...

This paper studies the implications of certain kinds of uncertainty for monetary policy. It first describes the optimum policy rule in a simple model of the transmission mechanism as in Ball and Svensson. It then examines how this rule ought to be modified when there is uncertainty about the...

This paper first describes the Bank of Canada’s approach to the design of large-value clearing and settlement systems. It then examines the way the Bank has operated under the Payment Clearing and Settlement Act, passed by Parliament in July 1996. Through this act, the Bank was assigned...

With the demise of monetary targeting over the past 20 years in many major countries, the question has arisen as to whether central banks should look at money at all when formulating and conducting monetary policy. The author argues that the mainstream paradigm, which gives no useful role to...