Search

This paper develops and estimates a dynamic, stochastic, general-equilibrium model with price and wage stickiness to analyze monetary policy in Canada.

This paper shows that if the Bank of Canada is optimally adjusting its monetary policy instrument in response to inflation indicators to target 2 per cent inflation at a two-year horizon, then deviations of inflation from 2 per cent represent the Bank's forecast errors, and should be uncorrelated with its information set, which includes two-year lagged values of the instrument and the indicators. Positive or negative correlations are evidence of systematic errors in monetary policy.

This paper examines the predictive power of credit spreads from the corporate bond market. The high-yield bond spread and investment-grade spread can explain 68 per cent and 42 per cent of output variations one year ahead, while the term spread based on government debts can explain only 12 per cent of them.

Traditional models of exchange rate regimes ignore the destabilizing effects of sharp and unanticipated exchange rate movements.

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.

This paper relies on simple vector autoregressions to investigate the monetary transmission mechanism in broad sectors of the Canadian economy. Two types of disaggregation are considered: one at the level of final expenditures, and one at the level of production.

This paper compares two types of monetary policy: price-level targeting and inflation targeting. It reviews recent arguments that favour price-level targeting, and examines how certain factors, such as the nature of the shocks affecting the economy and the degree to which agents are forward-looking, bear upon the arguments.

This paper empirically investigates the possibility that the effects of shocks to output depend on the level of inflation. The analysis extends Elwood's (1998) framework by incorporating in the model an inflation-threshold process that can potentially influence the stochastic properties of output.

It is commonly observed that central banks respond gradually to economic shocks, moving the interest rate in small discrete steps in the same direction over an extended period of time. This paper examines the empirical evidence regarding central banks' smoothing of interest rates, paying particular attention to the case of Canada.

In this paper, I consider a simple model in which agents learn about the inflation target of a central bank over time by observing the policy instrument or inflation outcomes. Measuring credibility as the distance between the perceived target and the actual target, an increase in credibility is beneficial to the central bank because it brings the policy consistent with attaining the inflation target closer to that required to attain the output target.