E52 - Monetary Policy
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May 16, 2013
Unconventional Monetary Policies: Evolving Practices, Their Effects and Potential Costs
Following the recent financial crisis, major central banks have introduced several types of unconventional monetary policy measures, including liquidity and credit facilities, asset purchases and forward guidance. To date, these measures appear to have been successful. They restored market functioning, facilitated the transmission of monetary policy and supported economic activity. They have potential costs, however, including challenges related to the greatly expanded balance sheets of central banks and the eventual exit from these measures, as well as the vulnerabilities that can arise from prolonged monetary accommodation. -
August 16, 2012
Measurement Bias in the Canadian Consumer Price Index: An Update
The consumer price index (CPI) is the most commonly used measure to track changes in the overall level of prices. Since it departs from a true cost-of-living index, the CPI is subject to four types of measurement bias—commodity substitution, outlet substitution, new goods and quality adjustment. The author updates previous Bank of Canada estimates of measurement bias in the Canadian CPI by examining these four sources of potential bias. He finds the total measurement bias over the 2005–11 period to be about 0.5 percentage point per year, consistent with the Bank’s earlier findings. Slightly more than half of this bias is caused by the fixed nature of the CPI basket of goods and services. -
Inflation and Growth: A New Keynesian Perspective
The long-run relation between growth and inflation has not yet been studied in the context of nominal price and wage rigidities, despite the fact that these rigidities now figure prominently in workhorse macroeconomic models. -
Unconventional Monetary Policy and the Great Recession: Estimating the Macroeconomic Effects of a Spread Compression at the Zero Lower Bound
We explore the macroeconomic effects of a compression in the long-term bond yield spread within the context of the Great Recession of 2007-2009 via a time-varying parameter structural VAR model. -
Commodities and Monetary Policy: Implications for Inflation and Price Level Targeting
We examine the relative ability of simple inflation targeting (IT) and price level targeting (PLT) monetary policy rules to minimize both inflation variability and business cycle fluctuations in Canada for shocks that have important consequences for global commodity prices. -
May 17, 2012
Inflation Targeting: The Recent International Experience
In the years since the 2006 renewal of Canada’s inflation-control agreement, monetary policy regimes have faced significant shocks, including the global economic and financial crisis. This article reviews the recent experience with inflation targeting, including the debate about the appropriate role of monetary policy in maintaining financial stability. In the aftermath of the crisis, both […] -
Bank Leverage Regulation and Macroeconomic Dynamics
This paper assesses the merits of countercyclical bank balance sheet regulation for the stabilization of financial and economic cycles and examines its interaction with monetary policy. -
Do Low Interest Rates Sow the Seeds of Financial Crises?
A view advanced in the aftermath of the late-2000s financial crisis is that lower than optimal interest rates lead to excessive risk taking by financial intermediaries. -
Price-Level Targeting and Inflation Expectations: Experimental Evidence
In this paper, we use an economics decision-making experiment to test a key assumption underpinning the efficacy of price-level targeting relative to inflation targeting for business cycle stabilization and mitigating the effects of the zero lower bound on nominal interest rates.