Bio

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.

Staff working papers

Limited Commitment, Endogenous Credibility and the Challenges of Price-level Targeting

Staff Working Paper 2018-61 Gino Cateau, Malik Shukayev
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.
Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Topic(s): Credibility, Inflation targets, Monetary policy framework JEL Code(s): E, E3, E31, E5, E52

A Policy Model to Analyze Macroprudential Regulations and Monetary Policy

Staff Working Paper 2014-6 Sami Alpanda, Gino Cateau, Césaire Meh
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.
Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Topic(s): Economic models, Financial system regulation and policies JEL Code(s): E, E1, E17, E3, E32, E4, E44, F, F4, F41

Adopting Price-Level Targeting under Imperfect Credibility in ToTEM

Staff Working Paper 2009-17 Gino Cateau, Oleksiy Kryvtsov, Malik Shukayev, Alexander Ueberfeldt
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.
Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Topic(s): Monetary policy framework, Monetary policy implementation JEL Code(s): E, E3, E31, E5, E52

Price Level versus Inflation Targeting under Model Uncertainty

Staff Working Paper 2008-15 Gino Cateau
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).
Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Topic(s): Monetary policy and uncertainty JEL Code(s): D, D8, D81, E, E5, E58

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Bank publications

Bank of Canada Review articles

March 9, 2010

Monetary Policy Rules in an Uncertain Environment

Bank of Canada Review - Spring 2010 Gino Cateau, Stephen Murchison
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.
Content Type(s): Publications, Bank of Canada Review articles Topic(s): Econometric and statistical methods, Economic models, Monetary policy and uncertainty, Monetary policy framework

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Financial System Review articles

December 15, 2015

Indebted Households and Potential Vulnerabilities for the Canadian Financial System: A Microdata Analysis

Financial System Review - December 2015 Gino Cateau, Tom Roberts, Jie Zhou
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.
Content Type(s): Publications, Financial System Review articles Topic(s): Credit and credit aggregates, Financial stability, Housing, Recent economic and financial developments JEL Code(s): D, D1, D14, E, E5, E51

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Journal publications

Publications

  • "Limited Commitment, Endogenous Credibility and the Challenges of Price-level Targeting"
    (with Malik Shukayev) Canadian Journal of Economics, vol. 55(4), 1834-61, 2022.
  • "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.