E3 - Prices, Business Fluctuations, and Cycles

• Changing Labour Market Participation Since the Great Recession: A Regional Perspective

  Staff Discussion Paper 2015-2 Calista Cheung, Dmitry Granovsky, Gabriella Velasco

  This paper discusses broad trends in labour force participation and part-time employment across different age groups since the Great Recession and uses provincial data to identify changes related to population aging, cyclical effects and other factors.

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff discussion papers Topic(s): Labour markets, Recent economic and financial developments, Regional economic developments JEL Code(s): E, E2, E24, E3, E32, J, J1, J2, J21, J6

• Measuring Potential Output at the Bank of Canada: The Extended Multivariate Filter and the Integrated Framework

  Staff Discussion Paper 2015-1 Lise Pichette, Pierre St-Amant, Ben Tomlin, Karine Anoma

  Estimating potential output and the output gap - the difference between actual output and its potential - is important for the proper conduct of monetary policy. However, the measurement and interpretation of potential output, and hence the output gap, is fraught with uncertainty, since it is unobservable.

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff discussion papers Topic(s): Economic models, Inflation and prices, Labour markets, Productivity JEL Code(s): E, E0, E3, E31, E5, E52

• Targeting Inflation from Below - How Do Inflation Expectations Behave?

  Staff Working Paper 2014-52 Michael Ehrmann

  Inflation targeting (IT) had originally been introduced as a device to bring inflation down and stabilize it at low levels. Given the current environment of persistently weak inflation in many advanced economies, IT central banks must now bring inflation up to target.

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Topic(s): Inflation and prices, Inflation targets JEL Code(s): C, C5, C53, E, E3, E31, E5, E52, E58
• November 13, 2014

  Recent Developments in Experimental Macroeconomics

  Bank of Canada Review - Autumn 2014 Robert Amano, Oleksiy Kryvtsov, Luba Petersen

  This article describes experimental economics, in general, and new developments in experimental macroeconomics, in particular. The approach has a clear niche in providing evidence on economic phenomena that cannot be observed directly or that are difficult to measure. Experimental work conducted by Bank of Canada economists has shed light on a number of issues important to monetary policy, such as the relative efficacy between price-level and inflation targeting, and the nature of inflation expectations formation.

  Content Type(s): Publications, Bank of Canada Review articles Topic(s): Inflation and prices, Monetary policy framework JEL Code(s): C, C9, E, E3, E31, E5, E52

• Credit Market Frictions and Sudden Stops

  Staff Working Paper 2014-49 Yuko Imura

  Financial crises in emerging economies in the 1980s and 1990s often entailed abrupt declines in foreign capital inflows, improvements in trade balance, and large declines in output and total factor productivity (TFP).

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Topic(s): Business fluctuations and cycles, Credit and credit aggregates, Financial markets, International topics JEL Code(s): E, E2, E22, E3, E32, F, F4, F41, G, G0, G01

• The Propagation of Industrial Business Cycles

  Staff Working Paper 2014-48 Maximo Camacho, Danilo Leiva-Leon

  This paper examines the business cycle linkages that propagate industry-specific business cycle shocks throughout the economy in a way that (sometimes) generates aggregated cycles. The transmission of sectoral business cycles is modelled through a multivariate Markov-switching model, which is estimated by Gibbs sampling.

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Topic(s): Business fluctuations and cycles, Domestic demand and components, Econometric and statistical methods JEL Code(s): C, C2, C22, E, E2, E27, E3, E32

• On the Importance of Sales for Aggregate Price Flexibility

  Staff Working Paper 2014-45 Oleksiy Kryvtsov, Nicolas Vincent

  Macroeconomists have traditionally ignored the behavior of temporary price markdowns (“sales”) by retailers. Although sales are common in the micro price data, they are assumed to be unrelated to macroeconomic phenomena and generally filtered out.

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Topic(s): Business fluctuations and cycles, Economic models, Inflation and prices, Market structure and pricing, Monetary policy transmission JEL Code(s): E, E3, E31, E32, E5, E52, L, L1, L11, L2, L25, L8, L81, M, M3, M31

• Integrating Uncertainty and Monetary Policy-Making: A Practitioner’s Perspective

  Staff Discussion Paper 2014-6 Stephen S. Poloz

  This paper discusses how central banking is evolving in light of recent experience, with particular emphasis on the incorporation of uncertainty into policy decision-making.

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff discussion papers Topic(s): Economic models, Financial stability, Monetary policy and uncertainty, Monetary policy communications, Monetary policy framework JEL Code(s): C, C5, C50, E, E3, E37, E5, E6, E61

• Real-Time Nowcasting of Nominal GDP Under Structural Breaks

  Staff Working Paper 2014-39 William A. Barnett, Marcelle Chauvet, Danilo Leiva-Leon

  This paper provides a framework for the early assessment of current U.S. nominal GDP growth, which has been considered a potential new monetary policy target. The nowcasts are computed using the exact amount of information that policy-makers have available at the time predictions are made. However, real-time information arrives at different frequencies and asynchronously, which poses challenges of mixed frequencies, missing data and ragged edges.

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Topic(s): Business fluctuations and cycles, Econometric and statistical methods, Inflation and prices JEL Code(s): C, C3, C32, E, E2, E27, E3, E31, E32

• A New Approach to Infer Changes in the Synchronization of Business Cycle Phases

  Staff Working Paper 2014-38 Danilo Leiva-Leon

  This paper proposes a Markov-switching framework to endogenously identify the following: (1) regimes where economies synchronously enter recessionary and expansionary phases; and (2) regimes where economies are unsynchronized, essentially following independent business cycles.

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Topic(s): Business fluctuations and cycles, Econometric and statistical methods, Regional economic developments JEL Code(s): C, C3, C32, C4, C45, E, E3, E32