E - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics

• Starting from a Blank Page? Semantic Similarity in Central Bank Communication and Market Volatility

  Staff Working Paper 2016-37 Michael Ehrmann, Jonathan Talmi

  Press releases announcing and explaining monetary policy decisions play a critical role in the communication strategy of central banks. Because of their market-moving potential, it is particularly important how they are drafted. Often, central banks start from the previous statement and update the earlier text with only small changes.

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Topic(s): Central bank research, Financial markets, Interest rates JEL Code(s): E, E4, E43, E5, E52, E58

• Output Comovement and Inflation Dynamics in a Two-Sector Model with Durable Goods: The Role of Sticky Information and Heterogeneous Factor Markets

  Staff Working Paper 2016-36 Tomiyuki Kitamura, Tamon Takamura

  In a simple two-sector New Keynesian model, sticky prices generate a counterfactual negative comovement between the output of durable and nondurable goods following a monetary policy shock. We show that heterogeneous factor markets allow any combination of strictly positive price stickiness to generate positive output comovement.

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Topic(s): Inflation and prices, Monetary policy transmission JEL Code(s): E, E3, E31, E32, E5, E52

• Relationships in the Interbank Market

  Staff Working Paper 2016-33 Jonathan Chiu, Cyril Monnet

  In the interbank market, banks will sometimes trade below the central bank's deposit rate. We explain this anomaly using a theory based on market frictions and relationship lending.

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Topic(s): Interest rates, Monetary policy implementation, Monetary policy transmission JEL Code(s): E, E4, E5

• The Role of Central Banks in Promoting Financial Stability: An International Perspective

  Staff Discussion Paper 2016-15 Rose Cunningham, Christian Friedrich

  The 2007–09 global financial crisis has led policy-makers around the world, including central banks, to refocus their efforts to promote financial stability. As part of this process, central banks became quite active in supporting financial stability in a variety of ways, such as publicly sharing their assessments of financial system vulnerabilities and risks and helping to strengthen regulation, supervision and macroprudential measures.

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff discussion papers Topic(s): Financial stability, Financial system regulation and policies JEL Code(s): E, E5, G, G0, G01, G2, G28

• Low for Longer? Why the Global Oil Market in 2014 Is Not Like 1986

  Staff Analytical Note 2016-11 Bahattin Buyuksahin, Reinhard Ellwanger, Kun Mo, Konrad Zmitrowicz

  In the second half of 2014, oil prices experienced a sharp decline, falling more than 50 per cent between June 2014 and January 2015. A cursory glance at this oil price crash suggests similarities to developments in 1986, when the price of oil declined by more than 50 per cent, initiating an episode of relatively low oil prices that lasted for more than a decade.

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff analytical notes Topic(s): International topics, Recent economic and financial developments JEL Code(s): E, E3, Q, Q4, Q41, Q43

• The Case of Serial Disappointment

  Staff Analytical Note 2016-10 Justin-Damien Guénette, Nicholas Labelle, Martin Leduc, Lori Rennison

  Similar to those of other forecasters, the Bank of Canada’s forecasts of global GDP growth have shown persistent negative errors over the past five years. This is in contrast to the pre-crisis period, when errors were consistently positive as global GDP surprised to the upside. All major regions have contributed to the forecast errors observed since 2011, although the United States has been the most persistent source of notable errors.

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff analytical notes Topic(s): Business fluctuations and cycles, Domestic demand and components, Economic models, International topics, Monetary policy and uncertainty, Potential output JEL Code(s): E, E2, E27, E6, E66, F, F0, F01

• Global Macro Risks in Currency Excess Returns

  Staff Working Paper 2016-32 Kimberly Berg, Nelson C. Mark

  We study a cross section of carry-trade-generated currency excess returns in terms of their exposure to global fundamental macroeconomic risk.

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Topic(s): Asset pricing, Exchange rates, Interest rates JEL Code(s): E, E2, E21, E4, E43, F, F3, F31, G, G1, G12

• The US Labour Market: How Much Slack Remains?

  Staff Analytical Note 2016-9 Robert Fay, James Ketcheson

  Despite the US unemployment rate being close to estimates of the non-accelerating-inflation rate of unemployment (NAIRU), measures of underemployment remain elevated, which could be an indication of remaining labour market slack. The shares of involuntary part-time workers and long-term unemployment are high relative to the current stage of the business cycle, suggesting available labour inputs are being underutilized.

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff analytical notes Topic(s): International topics, Labour markets, Recent economic and financial developments JEL Code(s): E, E2, E24, J, J2, J21, J23

• Housing Market Dynamics and Macroprudential Policy

  Staff Working Paper 2016-31 Gabriel Bruneau, Ian Christensen, Césaire Meh

  We perform an analysis to determine how well the introduction of a countercyclical loanto- value (LTV) ratio can reduce household indebtedness and housing price fluctuations compared with a monetary policy rule augmented with house price inflation.

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Topic(s): Business fluctuations and cycles, Financial stability, Housing, Monetary policy framework, Monetary policy transmission JEL Code(s): E, E3, E31, E4, E42, H, H2, H23

• Crude Oil Prices and Fixed-Asset Cash Spending in the Oil and Gas Industry: Findings from VAR Models

  Staff Analytical Note 2016-8 Farrukh Suvankulov

  This note investigates the relationship between crude oil prices and investment in the energy sector. We employ a set of vector autoregression (VAR) models (unconstrained VAR, vector error-correction and Bayesian VAR) to formalize the relationship between the West Texas Intermediate (WTI) benchmark and fixed-asset cash spending in the oil and gas extraction and support activities sector of the Canadian economy.

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff analytical notes Topic(s): Domestic demand and components, Econometric and statistical methods JEL Code(s): E, E2, E22, E27, Q, Q4, Q43, Q47