Central banks continuously strive to improve how they communicate to financial markets and the public in order to increase transparency. For this reason, many central banks have begun to include guidance on the policy rate in the form of forward-looking statements in their communications. This...

To investigate the extent to which the transparency of the Bank of Canada's monetary policy has improved, the authors examine empirically -- over the period 30 October 2000 to 31 May 2007 -- the reaction of Canadian financial markets to official Bank communications, and in particular their...

The authors develop a new methodology to investigate how crises cause the relationship between financial variables to change. Two possible sources of increased co-movement between markets during high-variance episodes are considered: larger common shocks operating through standard market...

This paper employs a Kalman filter approach to test the Expectations Hypothesis and characterize how term premia have changed over time for short-term Canadian interest rates. The Kalman filter approach is extended to account for changes in interest rate volatility, possible permanent changes in...

With the elimination of the federal deficit, the Bank of Canada, the Department of Finance, and financial market participants are examining ways to manage the reduction in the stock of marketable debt. This paper summarizes three different methods ¯ reverse auction, over-the-counter purchases,...