E52 - Monetary Policy
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Household Risk Management and Actual Mortgage Choice in the Euro Area
Mortgages constitute the largest part of household debt. An essential choice when taking out a mortgage is between fixed-interest-rate mortgages (FRMs) and adjustable-interest-rate mortgages (ARMs). However, so far, no comprehensive cross‐country study has analyzed what determines household demand for mortgage types, a task that this paper takes up using new data for the euro area. -
Expectations and Monetary Policy: Experimental Evidence
The effectiveness of monetary policy depends, to a large extent, on market expectations of its future actions. In a standard New Keynesian business-cycle model with rational expectations, systematic monetary policy reduces the variance of inflation and the output gap by at least two-thirds. -
Central Bank Communications Before, During and After the Crisis: From Open-Market Operations to Open-Mouth Policy
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. -
The Common Component of CPI: An Alternative Measure of Underlying Inflation for Canada
In this paper, the authors propose a measure of underlying inflation for Canada obtained from estimating a monthly factor model on individual components of the CPI. This measure, labelled the common component of CPI, has intuitive appeal and a number of interesting features. -
Money Market Rates and Retail Interest Regulation in China: The Disconnect between Interbank and Retail Credit Conditions
Interest rates in China are composed of a mix of both market-determined interest rates (interbank rates and bond yields), and regulated interest rates (retail lending and deposit rates), reflecting China’s gradual process of interest rate liberalization. -
May 16, 2013
Unconventional Monetary Policies: Evolving Practices, Their Effects and Potential Costs
Following the recent financial crisis, major central banks have introduced several types of unconventional monetary policy measures, including liquidity and credit facilities, asset purchases and forward guidance. To date, these measures appear to have been successful. They restored market functioning, facilitated the transmission of monetary policy and supported economic activity. They have potential costs, however, including challenges related to the greatly expanded balance sheets of central banks and the eventual exit from these measures, as well as the vulnerabilities that can arise from prolonged monetary accommodation. -
August 16, 2012
Measurement Bias in the Canadian Consumer Price Index: An Update
The consumer price index (CPI) is the most commonly used measure to track changes in the overall level of prices. Since it departs from a true cost-of-living index, the CPI is subject to four types of measurement bias—commodity substitution, outlet substitution, new goods and quality adjustment. The author updates previous Bank of Canada estimates of measurement bias in the Canadian CPI by examining these four sources of potential bias. He finds the total measurement bias over the 2005–11 period to be about 0.5 percentage point per year, consistent with the Bank’s earlier findings. Slightly more than half of this bias is caused by the fixed nature of the CPI basket of goods and services. -
Inflation and Growth: A New Keynesian Perspective
The long-run relation between growth and inflation has not yet been studied in the context of nominal price and wage rigidities, despite the fact that these rigidities now figure prominently in workhorse macroeconomic models. -
Unconventional Monetary Policy and the Great Recession: Estimating the Macroeconomic Effects of a Spread Compression at the Zero Lower Bound
We explore the macroeconomic effects of a compression in the long-term bond yield spread within the context of the Great Recession of 2007-2009 via a time-varying parameter structural VAR model.