In recent years the Bank of Canada has made important changes in the way it conducts monetary policy. In particular, the bank has adopted explicit inflation targets and introduced significant changes to its operational framework designed to increase transparency and reduce market uncertainty....

A method of testing the relative importance for consumption of risk sharing behavior and changes in current income is proposed and estimated using data across Canadian provinces. The focus of the estimation is less on whether or not the risk sharing model can be rejected than on how much each of...

Under a flexible inflation targeting regime, should policymakers avoid any reaction to movements in the foreign exchange market? Using data for six advanced open economies explicitly targeting inflation, the paper examines empirically whether real exchange rate disequilibria systematically...

Canadian public pension plans are run on a "pay-as-you-go" basis. As the baby boom ages, contribution rates for the two main plans are projected to rise significantly, from their current level of around 5 percent of eligible earnings to over 13 percent by 2030. An alternative is to set...

This note examines recent developments in the Canadian labor market to provide a partial assessment of the magnitude and nature of industrial restructuring in Canada. The implications of industrial restructuring for the medium- and long-term prospects for the Canadian economy are examined. The...

This paper examines recent developments in the Canadian labor market. Using disaggregated labor market data, various hypotheses concerning the slow employment growth and rise in unemployment since 1990 are evaluated. The analysis indicates that a large part of the recent rise in the unemployment...

The relationship between regional saving and investment is examined to measure the extent of capital mobility. The relationship between total regional saving and investment is significantly negative in Canada and the United Kingdom, in contrast to the significant positive relationship found...

This Selected Issues paper reviews empirical evidence on the main determinants of the real bilateral exchange rate between the Canadian and the U.S. dollars, with particular emphasis on the role played by cyclical and longer-term economic factors. The paper aims to identify the nature of the...

This Selected Issues paper reviews the factors that may explain high and persistent unemployment in Canada, with particular emphasis on the role that a decline in the relative cost of capital may have had on trend unemployment. The analysis suggests that in Canada a declining trend in the cost...

The paper investigates how changes in industries'' funding costs affect total factor productivity (TFP) growth. Based on panel regressions using 31 U.S. and Canadian industries between 1991 and 2007, and using industries'' dependence on external funding as an identification mechanism, we show...