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In this paper, the author calculates new measures of the trend inflation rate using changes in the components of total CPI; the hypothesis is that extreme fluctuations in certain prices reflect temporary supply shocks rather than any basic price trend.

This study, which draws on a variety of research on price dynamics in Canada, examines some hypotheses that might explain the poor quality of recent inflation forecasts based on the conventional Phillips curve.

In this paper, the authors examine how well the Hodrick-Prescott filter (HP) and the band-pass filter recently proposed by Baxter and King (BK) extract the business-cycle component of macroeconomic time series.

This paper examines the performance of M1 in an indicator-model of inflation over time horizons as long as 16 quarters into the future.

This paper attempts to provide one interpretation of the broad regional economic history of Canada since the early 1970s. As the title of the paper suggests, we believe that, to a significant degree, regional diversity in economic performance reflects movements in Canada's terms of trade, which very frequently are tied to developments in world commodity markets.

The purpose of this study is to test the hypothesis that inflation uncertainty increases at higher levels of inflation. Our analysis is based on the generalized autoregressive conditional heteroscedasticity (GARCH) class of models, which allow the conditional variance of the error term to be time-varying. Since this variance is a proxy for inflation uncertainty, a positive relationship between the conditional variance and inflation would be interpreted as evidence that inflation uncertainty increases with the level of inflation.

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.

In this paper, the author uses structural vector autoregression methodology to decompose U.S. nominal interest rates into an expected inflation component and an ex ante real interest rate component. He identifies inflation expectations and ex ante real interest rate shocks by assuming that nominal interest rates and inflation expectations move one-for-one in the long-run—they are cointegrated (1,1)—and that the real interest rate is stationary.

The consumer price index (CPI) may be an imperfect measure of changes in the cost of living owing to measurement biases known as commodity substitution bias, new goods bias, quality bias and outlet substitution bias. When the sum of these individual biases is positive, the rate of change in the CPI overstates the increase in […]

This paper examines wage and price dynamics in Canada with a view towards testing the implications of a wage-price dynamics, according to which unit labour costs are determined by a wage Phillips curve while prices are set as a markup over unit labour costs. This model is compared to an alternative model in which excess […]