E3 - Prices, Business Fluctuations, and Cycles

• Do Oil Price Increases Cause Higher Food Prices?

  Staff Working Paper 2013-52 Christiane Baumeister, Lutz Kilian

  U.S. retail food price increases in recent years may seem large in nominal terms, but after adjusting for inflation have been quite modest even after the change in U.S. biofuel policies in 2006. In contrast, increases in the real prices of corn, soybeans, wheat and rice received by U.S. farmers have been more substantial and can be linked in part to increases in the real price of oil.

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Topic(s): Inflation and prices, International topics JEL Code(s): E, E3, E31, Q, Q1, Q11, Q4, Q42, Q43

• Expectations and Monetary Policy: Experimental Evidence

  Staff Working Paper 2013-44 Oleksiy Kryvtsov, Luba Petersen

  The effectiveness of monetary policy depends, to a large extent, on market expectations of its future actions. In a standard New Keynesian business-cycle model with rational expectations, systematic monetary policy reduces the variance of inflation and the output gap by at least two-thirds.

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Topic(s): Business fluctuations and cycles, Monetary policy implementation, Monetary policy transmission JEL Code(s): C, C9, D, D8, D84, E, E3, E5, E52

• Perceived Inflation Persistence

  Staff Working Paper 2013-43 Monica Jain

  The Survey of Professional Forecasters (SPF) has had vast influence on research related to better understanding expectation formation and the behaviour of macroeconomic agents. Inflation expectations, in particular, have received a great deal of attention, since they play a crucial role in determining real interest rates, the expectations-augmented Phillips curve and monetary policy.

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

• High-Frequency Real Economic Activity Indicator for Canada

  Staff Working Paper 2013-42 Gitanjali Kumar

  I construct a weekly measure of real economic activity in Canada. Based on the work of Aruoba et al. (2009), the indicator is extracted as an unobserved component underlying the co-movement of four monthly observed real macroeconomic variables - employment, manufacturing sales, retail sales and GDP.

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Topic(s): Business fluctuations and cycles, Econometric and statistical methods JEL Code(s): C, C3, C38, E, E3, E32

• Unemployment Fluctuations in a Small Open-Economy Model with Segmented Labour Markets: The Case of Canada

  Staff Working Paper 2013-40 Yahong Zhang

  The recent financial crisis and subsequent recession have spurred great interest in the sources of unemployment fluctuations. Previous studies predominantly assume a single economy-wide labour market, and therefore abstract from differences across sectorspecific labour markets in the economy.

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Topic(s): Business fluctuations and cycles, Economic models, Labour markets JEL Code(s): E, E3, E32, E4, E44, J, J6

• ToTEM II: An Updated Version of the Bank of Canada’s Quarterly Projection Model

  Technical Report No. 100 José Dorich, Michael K. Johnston, Rhys R. Mendes, Stephen Murchison, Yang Zhang

  This report provides a detailed technical description of an updated version of the Terms-of-Trade Economic Model (ToTEM II), which replaced ToTEM (Murchison and Rennison 2006) in June 2011 as the Bank of Canada’s quarterly projection model for Canada.

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Technical reports Topic(s): Business fluctuations and cycles, Economic models JEL Code(s): E, E1, E17, E2, E20, E3, E30, E4, E40, E5, E50, F, F4, F41

• The Common Component of CPI: An Alternative Measure of Underlying Inflation for Canada

  Staff Working Paper 2013-35 Mikael Khan, Louis Morel, Patrick Sabourin

  In this paper, the authors propose a measure of underlying inflation for Canada obtained from estimating a monthly factor model on individual components of the CPI. This measure, labelled the common component of CPI, has intuitive appeal and a number of interesting features.

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Topic(s): Business fluctuations and cycles, Econometric and statistical methods, Inflation and prices, Monetary policy framework JEL Code(s): C, C1, E, E3, E31, E32, E5, E52, E58

• Forecasting the Real Price of Oil in a Changing World: A Forecast Combination Approach

  Staff Working Paper 2013-28 Christiane Baumeister, Lutz Kilian

  The U.S. Energy Information Administration regularly publishes short-term forecasts of the price of crude oil.

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Topic(s): Econometric and statistical methods, International topics JEL Code(s): C, C5, C53, E, E3, E32, Q, Q4, Q43
• August 15, 2013

  CSI: A Model for Tracking Short-Term Growth in Canadian Real GDP

  Bank of Canada Review - Summer 2013 André Binette, Jae Chang

  Canada’s Short-Term Indicator (CSI) is a new model that exploits the information content of 32 indicators to produce daily updates to forecasts of quarterly real GDP growth. The model is a data-intensive, judgment-free approach to short-term forecasting. While CSI’s forecasts at the start of the quarter are not very accurate, the model’s accuracy increases appreciably as more information becomes available. CSI is the latest addition to a wide range of models and information sources that the Bank of Canada uses, combined with expert judgment, to produce its short-term forecasts.

  Content Type(s): Publications, Bank of Canada Review articles Topic(s): Econometric and statistical methods JEL Code(s): C, C5, C53, E, E1, E17, E3, E37
• August 15, 2013

  The Accuracy of Short-Term Forecast Combinations

  Bank of Canada Review - Summer 2013 Eleonora Granziera, Corinne Luu, Pierre St-Amant

  This article examines whether combining forecasts of real GDP from different models can improve forecast accuracy and considers which model-combination methods provide the best performance. In line with previous literature, the authors find that combining forecasts generally improves forecast accuracy relative to various benchmarks. Unlike several previous studies, however, they find that, rather than assigning equal weights to each model, unequal weighting based on the past forecast performance of models tends to improve accuracy when forecasts across models are substantially different.

  Content Type(s): Publications, Bank of Canada Review articles Topic(s): Econometric and statistical methods JEL Code(s): C, C5, C52, C53, E, E3, E37