E - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics
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Starting from a Blank Page? Semantic Similarity in Central Bank Communication and Market Volatility
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. -
Output Comovement and Inflation Dynamics in a Two-Sector Model with Durable Goods: The Role of Sticky Information and Heterogeneous Factor Markets
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. -
Relationships in the Interbank Market
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. -
The Role of Central Banks in Promoting Financial Stability: An International Perspective
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. -
Low for Longer? Why the Global Oil Market in 2014 Is Not Like 1986
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. -
The Case of Serial Disappointment
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. -
Global Macro Risks in Currency Excess Returns
We study a cross section of carry-trade-generated currency excess returns in terms of their exposure to global fundamental macroeconomic risk. -
The US Labour Market: How Much Slack Remains?
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. -
Housing Market Dynamics and Macroprudential Policy
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.