Jamie is a Manager in Payment and Settlement Operations in the Banking and Payments Department (BAP). In this role, she is part of the team that settles the domestic and foreign financial transactions, and maintains relations with foreign central bank clients. Prior to working in BAP, Jamie has held various positions, including, in the Bank’s Financial Stability Department working in the oversight of financial market infrastructures and supporting international financial sector policies, and in the Canadian Economic Analysis Department forecasting the Canadian economy, analysing core inflation measures, and monetary policy rules. She holds an MA in economics from the University of British Columbia.
In recent years, there has been a lot of interest in Taylor-type rules. Evidence in the literature suggests that Taylor-type rules are optimal in a number of models and are fairly robust across different models.
A vector error-correction model (VECM) that forecasts inflation between the current quarter and eight quarters ahead is found to provide significant leading information about inflation. The model focusses on the effects of deviations of M1 from its long-run demand but also includes, among other things, the influence of the exchange rate, a simple measure of the output gap and past prices.
The authors examine the Bank of Canada's overnight rate as a measure of monetary policy in vector autoregression (VAR) models. Since the time series of the Bank's current measure of the overnight rate begins only in 1971, the authors splice it to day loan rate observations to obtain a sufficiently long period of data.
Since the Bank of Canada adopted inflation targeting in 1991, it has focused on a measure of core inflation as a shorter-term guide for monetary policy. When the targets were renewed in 2001, the Bank adopted CPIX as its measure of core inflation because of the advantages it offered. Leflèche and Armour review the experience with CPIX and whether the criteria used to select it in 2001 still favour the measure today. They describe the various measures of core inflation monitored by the Bank and evaluate them on the basis of the volatility of the components, the volatility of the core measures themselves, absence of bias relative to total CPI, predictive power, and certain practical criteria, including timeliness and credibility. They conclude that CPIX still satisfies all the empirical and practical criteria.
Feedback rules are rules aimed at guiding policy-makers as they face the problem of keeping inflation close to a desired path without causing variability elsewhere in the economy. These rules link short-term interest rates, controlled by the central bank, to the rate of inflation and/or its deviation from a target rate.
The authors describe the most popular types of feedback rules and review some simulation results.