Jamie Armour - Bank Publications

• June 11, 2006

  Evaluating Measures of Core Inflation

  Bank of Canada Review - Summer 2006 Thérèse Laflèche, Jamie Armour

  Since the Bank of Canada adopted inflation targeting in 1991, it has focused on a measure of core inflation as a shorter-term guide for monetary policy. When the targets were renewed in 2001, the Bank adopted CPIX as its measure of core inflation because of the advantages it offered. Leflèche and Armour review the experience with CPIX and whether the criteria used to select it in 2001 still favour the measure today. They describe the various measures of core inflation monitored by the Bank and evaluate them on the basis of the volatility of the components, the volatility of the core measures themselves, absence of bias relative to total CPI, predictive power, and certain practical criteria, including timeliness and credibility. They conclude that CPIX still satisfies all the empirical and practical criteria.

  Content Type(s): Publications, Bank of Canada Review articles Topic(s): Inflation and prices, Inflation targets, Monetary policy framework

• An Evaluation of Core Inflation Measures

  Staff Working Paper 2006-10 Jamie Armour

  The author provides a statistical evaluation of various measures of core inflation for Canada.

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

• Taylor Rules in the Quarterly Projection Model

  Staff Working Paper 2002-1 Ben Fung, Dinah Maclean, Jamie Armour

  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.

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Topic(s): Economic models, Monetary policy and uncertainty, Monetary policy framework JEL Code(s): E, E5, E52
• December 13, 1999

  Feedback Rules for Inflation Control: An Overview of Recent Literature

  Bank of Canada Review - Winter 1999–2000 Agathe Côté, Jamie Armour

  Feedback rules are rules aimed at guiding policy-makers as they face the problem of keeping inflation close to a desired path without causing variability elsewhere in the economy. These rules link short-term interest rates, controlled by the central bank, to the rate of inflation and/or its deviation from a target rate. The authors describe the most popular types of feedback rules and review some simulation results.

  Content Type(s): Publications, Bank of Canada Review articles Topic(s): Interest rates

• A Distant-Early-Warning Model of Inflation Based on M1 Disequilibria

  Staff Working Paper 1996-5 Joseph Atta-Mensah, Walter Engert, Scott Hendry, Jamie Armour

  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.

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Topic(s): Economic models, Monetary aggregates, Monetary policy transmission JEL Code(s): E, E3, E37, E5, E52

• Overnight Rate Innovations as a Measure of Monetary Policy Shocks in Vector Autoregressions

  Staff Working Paper 1996-4 Walter Engert, Ben Fung, Jamie Armour

  The authors examine the Bank of Canada's overnight rate as a measure of monetary policy in vector autoregression (VAR) models. Since the time series of the Bank's current measure of the overnight rate begins only in 1971, the authors splice it to day loan rate observations to obtain a sufficiently long period of data.

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Topic(s): Economic models, Monetary and financial indicators JEL Code(s): E, E5, E52