Joel Wagner is a Senior Economist in the Model Development Division of the Canadian Economic Analysis (CEA) Department at the Bank of Canada. His current research interests include macroeconomics, with a specific focus on how technology and innovation drive both business cycle volatility and economic growth. At the bank of Canada, he has been involved in understanding the impact downward nominal wage rigidity has on a workers wage-setting decision. Future research will continue along this path as well as focus on the impact innovations in financial technology have on banking sector.
We introduce bounded rationality in a canonical New Keynesian model calibrated to match Canadian macroeconomic data since Canada’s adoption of inflation targeting. We use the model to quantitatively assess the macroeconomic impact of alternative monetary policy regimes.
In this analysis, we use simulations in the Bank of Canada’s projection model—the Terms-of-Trade Economic Model—to consider a suite of extended monetary policies to support the economy following the COVID-19 crisis.
The existence of downward nominal wage rigidity (DNWR) has often been used to justify a positive inflation target. It is traditionally assumed that positive inflation could “grease the wheels” of the labour market by putting downward pressure on real wages, easing labour market adjustments during a recession.
Two approaches have been taken in the literature to evaluate the relative importance of news shocks as a source of business cycle volatility. The first is an empirical approach that performs a structural vector autoregression to assess the relative importance of news shocks, while the second is a structural-model-based approach.
We add agency costs as in Carlstrom and Fuerst (1997) into a two-country, two-good international business-cycle model. In our model, changes in the relative price of investment arise endogenously.
