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Although the current inflation-targeting regime has served Canadians well, sound public policy demands the continuous exploration of possible improvements in the monetary policy framework.

Although many countries have abandoned monetary targeting in recent decades, monetary aggregates are still useful indicators of future economic activity. Past research has shown that, compared with other monetary aggregates and expressed in real terms, net M1 and gross M1 have traditionally provided superior leading information for output growth.

The author studies the macroeconomic consequences of discretionary changes in the fiscal policy instruments for Canada.

The lack of consolidated Canadian micro data on household balance sheets and expenditures has been an important impediment to empirical research into real-financial linkages in the Canadian household sector. Our paper attempts to fill this data gap by merging household balance sheet data from the Canadian Financial Monitor survey with household expenditure data from the Survey of Household Spending.

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Leonard C. Wyon: Canada’s Victorian Engraver

Photography by Gord Carter

The authors investigate the behaviour of core inflation in Canada to analyze three key issues: (i) homogeneity in the response of various price indexes to demand or real exchange rate shocks relative to the response of aggregate core inflation; (ii) whether using disaggregate data helps to improve the forecast of core inflation; and (iii) whether using monthly data helps to improve quarterly forecasts.

This paper measures the welfare gains of switching from inflation-targeting to price-level targeting under imperfect credibility. Vestin (2006) shows that when the monetary authority cannot commit to future policy, price-level targeting yields higher welfare than inflation targeting.

The authors examine the institutional and governance framework of modern central banks to determine whether there are lessons that can be applied to the International Monetary Fund's (IMF's) institutional framework. Such a comparison is appealing for two reasons. First, both central banks and the IMF carry out tasks that can be described as "delegated responsibilities." […]

I propose a novel method to identify and estimate the macroeconomic effects of forward guidance and large-scale asset purchases (LSAP) for each FOMC announcement. I find that LSAP is more important than forward guidance in influencing output and inflation. LSAP puts upward pressure on short-term yields, so it should always be used in conjunction with forward guidance.

The authors empirically analyze the price-setting behaviour of the major Canadian banks in the residential mortgage market over the period 1991–2007. They use weekly posted prices of the major mortgage providers to study the degree of competition in mortgage price setting.