Inflation forecasting is fundamental to monetary policy. In practice, however, economists are faced with competing goals: accuracy and theoretical consistency.
This paper investigates the question of whether a transition to a low-inflation environment, induced by a shift in monetary policy, results in a decline in the degree of pass-through of exchange rate movements to consumer prices.
Since the autumn of 1997, the Bank of Canada's regional offices (located in Halifax, Montréal, Toronto, Calgary, and Vancouver) have conducted consultations with businesses across Canada on a quarterly basis. These consultations are now referred to as the Business Outlook Survey (BOS).
In an era when the primary policy instrument is the level of the short-term interest rate, a comparison of that rate with some equilibrium rate can be a useful guide for policy and a convenient method to measure the stance of monetary policy.
The authors develop a small open-economy dynamic stochastic general-equilibrium (DSGE) model in an attempt to understand the dynamic relationships in Canadian macroeconomic data.
The authors examine evidence of long- and short-run co-movement in Canadian sectoral output data. Their framework builds on a vector-error-correction representation that allows them to test for and compute full-information maximum-likelihood estimates of models with codependent cycle restrictions.
Recent empirical evidence suggests that private consumption is crowded-in by government spending. This outcome violates existing macroeconomic theory, according to which the negative wealth effect brought about by a rise in public expenditure should decrease consumption.