E31 - Price Level; Inflation; Deflation

• Limited Commitment, Endogenous Credibility and the Challenges of Price-level Targeting

  Staff Working Paper 2018-61 Gino Cateau, Malik Shukayev

  This paper studies the cost of limited commitment when a central bank has the discretion to adjust policy whenever the costs of honoring its past commitments become high. Specifically, we consider a central bank that seeks to implement optimal policy in a New Keynesian model by committing to a price-level target path.

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Topic(s): Credibility, Inflation targets, Monetary policy framework JEL Code(s): E, E3, E31, E5, E52

• Introducing a Systematic Measure of Idiosyncratic Prices

  Staff Analytical Note 2018-33 Madigan Dockrill, Laurence Savoie-Chabot

  There is a risk that Bank of Canada staff may inadvertently be biased when analyzing inflation: when inflation surprises on the downside, staff might emphasize negative idiosyncratic factors. When inflation surprises on the upside, staff might emphasize the positive idiosyncratic factors.

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff analytical notes Topic(s): Inflation and prices, Recent economic and financial developments JEL Code(s): E, E3, E31

• Price Selection

  Staff Working Paper 2018-44 Carlos Carvalho, Oleksiy Kryvtsov

  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.

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Topic(s): Business fluctuations and cycles, Inflation and prices, Monetary policy transmission JEL Code(s): E, E3, E31, E5, E51

• Sluggish Forecasts

  Staff Working Paper 2018-39 Monica Jain

  Given the influence that agents’ expectations have on key macroeconomic variables, it is surprising that very few papers have tried to extrapolate agents’ “true” expectations directly from the data. This paper presents one such approach, starting with the hypothesis that there is sluggishness in inflation and real GDP growth forecasts.

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Topic(s): Econometric and statistical methods, Inflation and prices JEL Code(s): E, E3, E31, E37

• On the Evolution of the United Kingdom Price Distributions

  Staff Working Paper 2018-25 Ba M. Chu, Kim Huynh, David T. Jacho-Chávez, Oleksiy Kryvtsov

  We propose a functional principal components method that accounts for stratified random sample weighting and time dependence in the observations to understand the evolution of distributions of monthly micro-level consumer prices for the United Kingdom (UK).

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Topic(s): Econometric and statistical methods, Inflation and prices JEL Code(s): C, C1, C14, C8, C83, E, E3, E31, E37

• Bending the Curves: Wages and Inflation

  Staff Analytical Note 2018-15 Dany Brouillette, Madigan Dockrill, Helen Lao, Laurence Savoie-Chabot

  As economic slack continues to be absorbed and the labour market tightens, wage growth and inflation could increase faster than expected, which would suggest convexity in their Phillips curves. This note investigates whether there is convexity in the Phillips curves for Canadian wage growth and inflation by testing different empirical approaches over the post-inflation-targeting period.

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff analytical notes Topic(s): Inflation and prices, Labour markets JEL Code(s): E, E2, E24, E3, E31, J, J3

• Non-linéarité de la courbe de Phillips : un survol de la littérature

  Staff Analytical Note 2018-3 Renaud St-Cyr

  The paper reviews evidence from the economic literature on the nature of the relationship between excess capacity and inflation, better known as the Phillips curve. In particular, we examine the linearity of this relationship. This is an important issue in the current economic context in which advanced economies are approaching or exceed their potential output.

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff analytical notes Topic(s): Inflation and prices, International topics JEL Code(s): E, E3, E31, E32