The days when secrecy and opacity were the bywords of central banking are gone. The advent of inflation targeting in the early 1990s acted as the catalyst for enhanced transparency and communications in the conduct of monetary policy. In the wake of the 2007-09 global financial crisis, this...

Using the Bank of Canada's main projection and policy-analysis model, ToTEM, this paper measures the welfare gains of switching from inflation targeting to price-level targeting under imperfect credibility. Following the policy change, private agents assign a probability to the event that the...

This paper applies a static model of an interest rate corridor to the Canadian data, and estimates the aggregate demand for central-bank settlement balances in the Large Value Transfer System (LVTS). The empirical specification controls for various calendar effects that have been shown to cause...

This paper uses Latent Semantic Analysis to extract information from Bank of Canada communication statements and investigates what type of information affects returns and volatility in short-term as well as long-term interest rate markets over the 2002-2008 period. Discussions about geopolitical...

Measures have been taken by the Bank of Canada to increase the transparency of Canadian monetary policy. This paper examines whether the greater transparency has improved financial markets’ understanding of the conduct of monetary policy. In theory, it should result in reduced conditional...

Although the concept of monetary policy lag has historical roots deep in the monetary economics literature, relatively little attention has been paid to the idea. In this paper, we build on Svensson’s (1997) inflation targeting framework by explicitly taking into account the lagged effect of...

Monetary policy can be implemented effectively without reserve requirements as long as cost incentives ensure a predictable demand for settlement balances. A central bank can then achieve the level of short-term interest rates that it desires, using market-oriented instruments only. In Canada,...

It is commonly observed that central banks respond gradually to economic shocks, moving the interest rate in small discrete steps in the same direction over an extended period of time. This paper examines the empirical evidence regarding central banks' smoothing of interest rates, paying...

The author provides a non-technical explanation of the role played by the exchange rate in Canada's inflation-targeting monetary policy. He reviews the motivation for inflation targeting and describes the monetary transmission mechanism. Though the exchange rate is an integral component of the...