Luba Petersen

Author

Staff working papers

Communicating Inflation Uncertainty and Household Expectations

Staff Working Paper 2023-63 Olena Kostyshyna, Luba Petersen
We examine the value of direct communication to households about inflation and the uncertainty around inflation statistics. All types of information about inflation are effective at immediately managing inflation expectations, with information about outlooks being more effective and relevant than that about recent inflation and Bank targets.

A Horse Race of Monetary Policy Regimes: An Experimental Investigation

Staff Working Paper 2022-33 Olena Kostyshyna, Luba Petersen, Jing Yang
How should central banks design monetary policy in stable times and during recessions? We run a horse race between five monetary policy frameworks in an experimental laboratory to assess how well the different approaches can manage the public’s expectations and stabilize the economy.

Central Bank Communication That Works: Lessons from Lab Experiments

Staff Working Paper 2019-21 Oleksiy Kryvtsov, Luba Petersen
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.

Expectations and Monetary Policy: Experimental Evidence

Staff Working Paper 2013-44 Oleksiy Kryvtsov, Luba Petersen
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.

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Bank publications

Bank of Canada Review articles

November 13, 2014

Recent Developments in Experimental Macroeconomics

This article describes experimental economics, in general, and new developments in experimental macroeconomics, in particular. The approach has a clear niche in providing evidence on economic phenomena that cannot be observed directly or that are difficult to measure. Experimental work conducted by Bank of Canada economists has shed light on a number of issues important to monetary policy, such as the relative efficacy between price-level and inflation targeting, and the nature of inflation expectations formation.

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