D84 - Expectations; Speculations
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Central Bank Communication That Works: Lessons from Lab Experiments
We use controlled laboratory experiments to test the causal effects of central bank communication on economic expectations and to distinguish the underlying mechanisms of those effects. In an experiment where subjects learn to forecast economic variables, we find that central bank communication has a stabilizing effect on individual and aggregate outcomes and that the size of the effect varies with the type of communication. -
Non-Resident Taxes and the Role of House Price Expectations
In recent years, the governments of Ontario and British Columbia have imposed taxes on purchases by non-Canadian residents of residential properties in certain jurisdictions. -
On the Tail Risk Premium in the Oil Market
This paper shows that changes in market participants’ fear of rare events implied by crude oil options contribute to oil price volatility and oil return predictability. Using 25 years of historical data, we document economically large tail risk premia that vary substantially over time and significantly forecast crude oil futures and spot returns. -
A General Approach to Recovering Market Expectations from Futures Prices with an Application to Crude Oil
Futures markets are a potentially valuable source of information about price expectations. Exploiting this information has proved difficult in practice, because time-varying risk premia often render the futures price a poor measure of the market expectation of the price of the underlying asset. -
Understanding Firms' Inflation Expectations Using the Bank of Canada's Business Outlook Survey
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. -
What Is Behind the Weakness in Global Investment?
The recovery in private business investment globally remains extremely weak more than seven years after the financial crisis. This paper contributes to the ongoing policy debate on the factors behind this weakness by analyzing the role of growth prospects and uncertainty in explaining developments in non-residential private business investment in large advanced economies since the crisis. -
November 19, 2015
A Survey of Consumer Expectations for Canada
The Bank of Canada recently launched a quarterly survey to measure the expectations of Canadian households: the Canadian Survey of Consumer Expectations (CSCE). The data collected provide comprehensive information about consumer expectations for and uncertainty about inflation, the labour market and household finance. This article describes the CSCE and illustrates its potential to offer rich information about Canadian consumers for researchers and policy-makers. -
Consumer Attitudes and the Epidemiology of Inflation Expectations
This paper studies the formation of consumers’ inflation expectations using micro-level data from the Michigan Survey. It shows that beyond the well-established socio-economic determinants of inflation expectations such as gender, income or education, other characteristics such as the households’ financial situation and their purchasing attitudes also matter. -
Expectations and Monetary Policy: Experimental Evidence
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. -
Risk Perceptions and Attitudes
Changes in risk perception have been used in various contexts to explain shorter-term developments in financial markets, as part of a mechanism that amplifies fluctuations in financial markets, as well as in accounts of "irrational exuberance."