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Stephen Murchison reviews the findings of recent Bank of Canada research on the relative merits of inflation targeting and price-level targeting (PLT) for a small open economy, such as Canada's, that is susceptible to large and persistent terms-of-trade shocks.

This paper contributes to the debate on the magnitude of exchange rate elasticities by providing a set of price and quantity elasticities for 51 advanced and emerging-market economies. Specifically, for each of these countries we report the elasticity of trade prices and trade quantities on both the export and on the import sides, as well as the reaction of the trade balance.

This document provides information about the functions, programs, activities and related information holdings of government institutions subject to the Access to Information Act and the Privacy Act.

Salespeople are widely employed in many industries. We leverage a unique data set on retail sales from a leading Chinese cold-drink manufacturer and information on the firm’s salespeople assignment rule to measure the causal effect of salespeople on product revenue.

Underlying wage growth has fallen short of what would be consistent with an economy operating with little or no slack. While many factors could explain this weakness, the availability of additional labour resources from informal (“gig”) work—not fully captured in standard measures of employment and hours worked—may play a role.

We introduce generalized autoregressive gamma (GARG) processes, a class of autoregressive and moving-average processes in which each conditional moment dynamic is driven by a different and identifiable moving average of the variable of interest. We show that using GARG processes reduces pricing errors by substantially more than using existing autoregressive gamma processes does.

In this piece we show that a limit on the level of asset encumbrance and minimum capital requirements are effective tools for minimizing the incentive for banks to take excessive risk.

Many reports and analyses interpret the release of new economic data based on the headline surprise—for instance, total inflation, real GDP growth and the unemployment rate. However, we find that headline news alone cannot adequately explain the responses of market prices to new information. Rather, market prices react more strongly, on average, to non-headline news such as the composition of GDP growth, quality of jobs created and revisions to past data. Thus, tracking the impact of non-headline information released on the news day is crucial in analyzing how markets interpret and react to new economic data.

We propose a simple, model-free way to measure selection in price setting and its contribution to inflation dynamics. The proposed measure of price selection is based on the observed comovement between inflation and the average level from which adjusting prices depart.

This note examines how monetary policy responses to shelter inflation affect both the overall economy and different households. We find that the aggregate macroeconomic effects of responding to shelter inflation are modest, whereas the redistributive consequences across households are substantially larger.