In this paper, we argue that differences in the cost structures across sectors play an important role in firms’ decisions to adjust their prices. We develop a menu-cost model of pricing in which retail firms intermediate trade between producers and consumers.
Between mid-2014 and early 2016, oil prices fell by roughly 65 per cent. This note documents the channels through which this oil price decline is expected to affect the global economy. One important and immediate channel is through higher expenditures, especially in net oil-importing countries.
We assess the importance of downward nominal wage rigidity (DNWR) in Canada using both firm- and worker-level microdata. In particular, we analyze employer-level administrative data from the Major Wage Settlements (MWS) and household-based survey data from the Survey of Labour Income Dynamics (SLID).
In a simple two-sector New Keynesian model, sticky prices generate a counterfactual negative comovement between the output of durable and nondurable goods following a monetary policy shock. We show that heterogeneous factor markets allow any combination of strictly positive price stickiness to generate positive output comovement.
In the second half of 2014, oil prices experienced a sharp decline, falling more than 50 per cent between June 2014 and January 2015. A cursory glance at this oil price crash suggests similarities to developments in 1986, when the price of oil declined by more than 50 per cent, initiating an episode of relatively low oil prices that lasted for more than a decade.
Decomposing total inflation in Canada as measured by the consumer price index (CPI) into its key macroeconomic factors, as presented in the most recent Monetary Policy Report, is an interesting exercise that shows how the exchange rate pass-through, commodity prices and the output gap have influenced the evolution of the total inflation rate over time. This aggregate approach, however, may mask important sectoral changes.
In this note, we provide a brief outline of the recent developments in wage measures in Canada. We then assess whether wage growth is consistent with its fundamentals.
This paper evaluates the effects of high-frequency uncertainty shocks on a set of low-frequency macroeconomic variables that are representative of the U.S. economy. Rather than estimating models at the same common low-frequency, we use recently developed econometric models, which allows us to deal with data of different sampling frequencies.
Inflation expectations are a key determinant of actual and future inflation and thus matter for the conduct of monetary policy. We study how firms form their inflation expectations using quarterly firm-level data from the Bank of Canada’s Business Outlook Survey, spanning the 2001 to 2015 period.