Cars Hommes is Senior Research Advisor of the Canadian Economic Analysis Department at the Bank of Canada. His research field is behavioral macro-finance, with primary research interests in bounded rationality, expectations and learning, evolutionary finance, experimental economics and complex macro-financial systems. Cars Hommes received his PhD in economics from University of Groningen and teaches behavioral macro-finance at the University of Amsterdam.
We introduce a model to detect periods of extrapolative house price expectations across Canadian cities. The House Price Exuberance Indicator can be updated on a quarterly basis to support the Bank of Canada’s broader assessment of housing market imbalances.
We conduct a large-scale survey to shed light on what people believe about public finance. An experiment demonstrates that central bank communication can persistently shift views on monetary financing. It further suggests that views on monetary financing impact support for fiscal discipline.
This paper brings novel insights into group coordination and price dynamics in complex environments. We implement a chaotic overlapping-generation model in the lab and find that group coordination is always on the steady state or on the two-cycle and that behavior is non-monotonic.
The Bank of Canada’s current suite of models faces challenges in addressing network effects that integrate household and firm-level heterogeneity and their behaviours. We develop CANVAS, a Canadian behavioural agent-based model to contribute to the Bank’s next-generation modelling effort. CANVAS improves forecasting performance and expands capacity for model-based scenario analysis.
We introduce behavioral learning equilibria (BLE) into DSGE models with boundedly rational agents using simple but optimal first order autoregressive forecasting rules. The Smets-Wouters DSGE model with BLE is estimated and fits well with inflation survey expectations. As a policy application, we show that learning requires a lower degree of interest rate smoothing.
A multi-country consumer survey investigates why and how much households decreased their consumption in five key sectors after pandemic-related restrictions were lifted in Europe in July 2020. Beyond infection risk and precautionary saving motives, households also reported not missing some consumption items, which may indicate preference shifts and structural changes in the post-COVID-19 economy.
Economic activities typically involve coordination among a large number of agents. These agents have to anticipate what other agents think before making their own decisions.
Most models in finance assume that agents make trading plans over the infinite future. We consider instead that they are boundedly rational and may only form forecasts over a limited horizon.
Policy implications are derived for an inflation-targeting central bank, whose credibility is endogenous and depends on its past ability to achieve its targets. This is done in a New Keynesian framework with heterogeneous and boundedly rational expectations.
