Gino Cateau became a Senior Policy Director in the Canadian Economic Analysis Department (CEA), effective May 13, 2024. In this capacity, he is a member of the department’s senior management team, providing leadership and strategic direction to CEA, and helping oversee analysis, modelling and research on the Canadian economy and monetary policy.
Gino joined the Bank in 2004 as a Senior Analyst with the Canadian Economic Analysis Department and has since held increasingly senior positions across various departments. He has worked on the assessment of household vulnerabilities, developed macroeconomic models with financial linkages to analyze the interaction between monetary and macroprudential policy, analyzed the implications of uncertainty on monetary policy decisions, and the design of robust policy and projection frameworks.
Born in Mauritius, Gino has a BSc and MSc in econometrics and mathematical economics from the London School of Economics, and a PhD in economics from the University of Chicago.
This paper studies the cost of limited commitment when a central bank has the discretion to adjust policy whenever the costs of honoring its past commitments become high. Specifically, we consider a central bank that seeks to implement optimal policy in a New Keynesian model by committing to a price-level target path.
We construct a small-open-economy, New Keynesian dynamic stochastic general-equilibrium model with real-financial linkages to analyze the effects of financial shocks and macroprudential policies on the Canadian economy. Our model has four key features.
Using the Bank of Canada's main projection and policy-analysis model, ToTEM, this paper measures the welfare gains of switching from inflation targeting to price-level targeting under imperfect credibility. Following the policy change, private agents assign a probability to the event that the policy-maker will revert to inflation-targeting next period.
This paper proposes a simple analytical method to determine the stationarity of an unnormalized variable from the solution to a normalized model i.e. a model whose variables must be expressed in relative terms or must be differenced for a solution to exist.
The purpose of this paper is to make a quantitative contribution to the inflation versus price level targeting debate. It considers a policy-maker that can set policy either through an inflation targeting rule or a price level targeting rule to minimize a quadratic loss function using the actual projection model of the Bank of Canada (ToTEM).
Policy-makers in the United States over the past 15 to 20 years seem to have been cautious in setting policy: empirical estimates of monetary policy rules such as Taylor's (1993) rule are much less aggressive than those derived from optimizing models.
This article examines recent research on the influence of various forms of economic uncertainty on the performance of different classes of monetary policy rules: from simple rules to fully optimal monetary policy under commitment. The authors explain why uncertainty matters in the design of monetary policy rules and provide quantitative examples from the recent literature. They also present results for several policy rules in ToTEM, the Bank of Canada's main model for projection and analysis, including rules that respond to price level, rather than to inflation.
Over the past decade, an increasing proportion of households in Canada have become highly indebted relative to their income. These highly indebted households now hold one-fifth of total Canadian household debt.Simulations suggest that this greater degree of household indebtedness could exacerbate the impact of shocks to income and interest rates relative to the pre-crisis period. However, an assessment of the vulnerability of the Canadian financial system should, among other factors, account for the ability of Canadian financial institutions to withstand losses from the household sector.
"Monetary Policy under Model and Data-Parameter Uncertainty" Journal of Monetary Economics, vol. 54(7), pp 2083-2101, October 2007.
"Price Level versus Inflation Targeting under Model Uncertainty" Canadian Journal of Economics, vol. 50(2), May 2017 (Harry Johnson award for best paper published in CJE in 2017).
"A policy model to analyze macroprudential regulations and monetary policy" (with Sami Alpanda and Césaire Meh), Canadian Journal of Economics, vol. 51(3), August 2018.
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