Monetary Policy Under Okun’s Hypothesis
The current monetary policy framework of the Fed intends to be more ’inclusive’ by running the economy hot for longer during expansions.
E21 - Consumption; Saving; Wealth
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Housing and the Long-Term Real Effects of Changes in Trend Inflation
An economy with fixed amortization mortgages and borrowing-constrained consumers leads to the level of inflation targeted having real effects on home ownership, consumption, and debt. Using a life-cycle housing tenure choice model, we show that by front-loading real mortgage payments, higher inflation lowers steady-state home ownership and the mortgage-debt-to-income ratio. -
Uncovering Subjective Models from Survey Expectations
This paper shows that survey expectations can be used to uncover how households subjectively think about inflation and unemployment dynamics jointly. The commonly documented "stagflation view", namely the households' tendency to associate inflation with a worse labor market, implies amplified impacts of supply shocks and dampened ones of demand shocks. -
Household balance sheets and mortgage payment shocks
Household savings in Canada have increased significantly since 2019, especially among homeowners without a mortgage. We assess how savings buffers can mitigate households’ financial risk in relation to asset repricing, mortgage payment renewal and unemployment. -
Perceived Unemployment Risks over Business Cycles
Aggregate consumption impacts of heightened job risks during recessions can arise either from ex-ante responses to the fear of unemployment or from ex-post consumption declines due to realized income losses. We use survey-based perceptions of job risk and actual labor market transitions to quantify the relative contributions of these two channels. We further show that belief stickiness limits the extent of ex-ante insurance against job risks. -
Synthesizing Signals from the Canadian Survey of Consumer Expectations
We introduce the Canadian Survey of Consumer Expectations indicator. This indicator provides a summary measure of consumer opinions that we can track over time. We construct three underlying sub-indexes—financial health, labour market and consumer spending—that capture different factors influencing consumers’ daily lives. -
Seasonal Adjustment of Weekly Data
The industry standard for seasonally adjusting data, X-13ARIMA-SEATS, is not suitable for high-frequency data. We summarize and assess several of the most popular seasonal adjustment methods for weekly data given the increased availability and promise of non-traditional data at higher frequencies. -
From Micro to Macro Hysteresis: Long-Run Effects of Monetary Policy
We explore the long-run effects of a monetary policy shock in a Heterogeneous Agent New Keynesian model built on the micro evidence that job losses lead to persistently lower individual earnings through a combination of skill decay and abandonment of the labour force. -
Consumer Credit Regulation and Lender Market Power
We investigate the welfare consequences of consumer credit regulation in a dynamic, heterogeneous-agent model with endogenous lender market power. Lenders post credit offers and borrowers—some informed and others uninformed—apply for credit. We calibrate the model to match characteristics of the unsecured consumer credit market and use the calibrated model to evaluate interest rate ceilings. -
Household Food Inflation in Canada
We study food inflation rates for Canadian households during periods of low and high inflation from 2012Q4 to 2023Q4. Households experienced more varied inflation rates during the recent high inflation. Cumulative food inflation has been 2.2 percentage points higher for lower-income households than for highest-income households since the inflation surge.