Bio

Oleksiy Kryvtsov is the Senior Research Officer in the Economic and Financial Research Department. His research interests center on business cycle fluctuations, with a special focus on monetary theory and policy. Oleksiy contributed to topics including consumer price behaviour, real effects of monetary policy shocks, dynamics of markups and costs over the business cycle. Oleksiy received his PhD in Economics from the University of Minnesota in 2004.


Staff discussion papers

Has the Inflation Process Changed? Selective Review of Recent Research on Inflation Dynamics

Staff Discussion Paper 2020-11 Oleksiy Kryvtsov, James (Jim) C. MacGee
From 2011 to 2019, inflation in Canada and advanced economies usually registered below inflation targets, spurring the debate on whether the inflation process has changed. This paper highlights emerging questions that will influence the conduct of monetary policy in Canada in the near term.

Leaning Within a Flexible Inflation-Targeting Framework: Review of Costs and Benefits

Staff Discussion Paper 2016-17 Denis Gorea, Oleksiy Kryvtsov, Tamon Takamura
This note examines the merits of monetary policy adjustments in response to financial stability concerns, taking into account changes in the state of knowledge since the renewal of the inflation-targeting agreement in 2011. A key financial system vulnerability in Canada is elevated household indebtedness: as more and more households are nearing their debt-capacity limits, the likelihood and severity of a large negative correction in housing markets are also increasing.

The Optimal Level of the Inflation Target: A Selective Review of the Literature and Outstanding Issues

Staff Discussion Paper 2015-8 Oleksiy Kryvtsov, Rhys R. Mendes
Bank of Canada research done prior to the most recent renewal of the inflation-control agreement in 2011 concluded that the benefits associated with a target below 2 per cent were insufficient to justify the increased risk of being constrained by the zero lower bound (ZLB) on nominal interest rates.

On the Nexus of Monetary Policy and Financial Stability: Recent Developments and Research

Staff Discussion Paper 2015-7 Oleksiy Kryvtsov, Miguel Molico, Ben Tomlin
Because financial and macroeconomic conditions are tightly interconnected, financial stability considerations are an important element of any monetary policy framework. Yet, the circumstances under which it would be appropriate for the Bank to use monetary policy to lean against financial risks need to be more fully specified (Côté 2014).

Inventories, Stockouts, and ToTEM

Staff Discussion Paper 2010-8 Oleksiy Kryvtsov, Yang Zhang
Inventory investment is an important component of the Canadian business cycle. Despite its small average size – less than 1 per cent of output – it exhibits volatile procyclical fluctuations, accounting for almost one-third of output variance.

See More

Staff working papers

House Price Responses to Monetary Policy Surprises: Evidence from the U.S. Listings Data

Staff Working Paper 2022-39 Denis Gorea, Oleksiy Kryvtsov, Marianna Kudlyak
Existing literature documents that house prices respond to monetary policy surprises with a significant delay, taking years to reach their peak response. We present new evidence of a much faster response.

More Than Words: Fed Chairs’ Communication During Congressional Testimonies

Staff Working Paper 2022-20 Michelle Alexopoulos, Xinfen Han, Oleksiy Kryvtsov, Xu Zhang
We measure soft information contained in the congressional testimonies of U.S. Federal Reserve Chairs and analyze its effect on financial markets. Increases in the Chair’s text-, voice-, or face-emotion indices during these testimonies generally raise stock prices and lower their volatility.

What Can Stockouts Tell Us About Inflation? Evidence from Online Micro Data

Staff Working Paper 2021-52 Alberto Cavallo, Oleksiy Kryvtsov
Did supply disruptions and cost pressures play a role in rising inflation in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic? Using data collected from websites of large retailers in multiple sectors and countries, we show that shortages may indicate transitory inflationary pressures.

Multi-Product Pricing: Theory and Evidence from Large Retailers in Israel

Standard theories of price adjustment are based on the problem of a single-product firm, and therefore they may not be well suited to analyze price dynamics in the economy with multiproduct firms.

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.

Price Selection

Staff Working Paper 2018-44 Carlos Carvalho, Oleksiy Kryvtsov
We propose a simple, model-free way to measure selection in price setting and its contribution to inflation dynamics. The proposed measure of price selection is based on the observed comovement between inflation and the average level from which adjusting prices depart.

On the Evolution of the United Kingdom Price Distributions

We propose a functional principal components method that accounts for stratified random sample weighting and time dependence in the observations to understand the evolution of distributions of monthly micro-level consumer prices for the United Kingdom (UK).

On the Importance of Sales for Aggregate Price Flexibility

Staff Working Paper 2014-45 Oleksiy Kryvtsov, Nicolas Vincent
Macroeconomists have traditionally ignored the behavior of temporary price markdowns (“sales”) by retailers. Although sales are common in the micro price data, they are assumed to be unrelated to macroeconomic phenomena and generally filtered out.

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.

Is There a Quality Bias in the Canadian CPI? Evidence from Micro Data

Staff Working Paper 2013-24 Oleksiy Kryvtsov
Rising consumer prices may reflect shifts by consumers to new higher-priced products, mostly for durable and semi-durable goods. I apply Bils’ (2009) methodology to newly available Canadian consumer price data for non-shelter goods and services to estimate how price increases can be divided between quality growth and price inflation.
Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Topic(s): Inflation and prices, Potential output JEL Code(s): E, E3, E31, M, M1, M11, O, O4, O47

See More


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.

See More


Journal publications

Journal articles