The Benefits of Low Inflation: Taking Stock Technical Report No. 83 Brian O'Reilly This paper surveys the empirical literature on the benefits of low inflation, emphasizing contributions since 1990. It follows the framework of a section in the Bank's 1990 Annual Report, "The benefits of price stability." Content Type(s): Staff research, Technical reports Topic(s): Inflation: costs and benefits JEL Code(s): E, E3
A Measure of Underlying Inflation in the United States Staff Working Paper 1997-20 Iris Claus A monetary authority with the primary objective of price stability has to distinguish between temporary price shocks and persistent shocks to the rate of inflation. A measure of underlying inflation, therefore, has an important role to play as a guideline for monetary policy. Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Topic(s): Inflation and prices, International topics JEL Code(s): E, E3, E31
Menu Costs, Relative Prices, and Inflation: Evidence for Canada Staff Working Paper 1997-14 Robert Amano, Tiff Macklem The menu-cost models of price adjustment developed by Ball and Mankiw (1994;1995) predict that short-run movements in inflation should be positively related to the skewness and the variance of the distribution of disaggregated relative-price shocks in each period. We test these predictions on Canadian data using the distribution of changes in disaggregated producer prices to measure the skewness and standard deviation of relative-price shocks. Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Topic(s): Inflation and prices, Monetary policy framework JEL Code(s): C, C5, C52, E, E3, E31
A Band-Aid Solution to Inflation Targeting Staff Working Paper 1997-11 Robert Amano, Richard Black, Marcel Kasumovich This paper reviews selectively the literature on exchange rate target zones and corresponding methodologies and examines whether they can be used to analyse the inflation-control problem. Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Topic(s): Inflation targets JEL Code(s): E, E3, E31, E5, E50
Mesures du taux d'inflation tendanciel Staff Working Paper 1997-9 Thérèse Laflèche In this paper, the author calculates new measures of the trend inflation rate using changes in the components of total CPI; the hypothesis is that extreme fluctuations in certain prices reflect temporary supply shocks rather than any basic price trend. Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Topic(s): Inflation and prices JEL Code(s): E, E3, E31
La courbe de Phillips au Canada : un examen de quelques hypothèses Staff Working Paper 1997-3 Jean-François Fillion, André Léonard This study, which draws on a variety of research on price dynamics in Canada, examines some hypotheses that might explain the poor quality of recent inflation forecasts based on the conventional Phillips curve. Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Topic(s): Inflation and prices, Inflation targets JEL Code(s): C, C5, C52, E, E3, E31
Do Mechanical Filters Provide a Good Approximation of Business Cycles? Technical Report No. 78 Alain Guay, Pierre St-Amant In this paper, the authors examine how well the Hodrick-Prescott filter (HP) and the band-pass filter recently proposed by Baxter and King (BK) extract the business-cycle component of macroeconomic time series. Content Type(s): Staff research, Technical reports Topic(s): Econometric and statistical methods JEL Code(s): C, C5, C52, E, E3, E32
A Modified P*-Model of Inflation Based on M1 Staff Working Paper 1996-15 Joseph Atta-Mensah This paper examines the performance of M1 in an indicator-model of inflation over time horizons as long as 16 quarters into the future. Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Topic(s): Economic models JEL Code(s): E, E3, E37
The Commodity-Price Cycle and Regional Economic Performance in Canada Staff Working Paper 1996-12 Mario Lefebvre, Stephen S. Poloz This paper attempts to provide one interpretation of the broad regional economic history of Canada since the early 1970s. As the title of the paper suggests, we believe that, to a significant degree, regional diversity in economic performance reflects movements in Canada's terms of trade, which very frequently are tied to developments in world commodity markets. Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Topic(s): Regional economic developments JEL Code(s): E, E3, E32
Does Inflation Uncertainty Vary with the Level of Inflation? Staff Working Paper 1996-9 Allan Crawford, Marcel Kasumovich The purpose of this study is to test the hypothesis that inflation uncertainty increases at higher levels of inflation. Our analysis is based on the generalized autoregressive conditional heteroscedasticity (GARCH) class of models, which allow the conditional variance of the error term to be time-varying. Since this variance is a proxy for inflation uncertainty, a positive relationship between the conditional variance and inflation would be interpreted as evidence that inflation uncertainty increases with the level of inflation. Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Topic(s): Inflation and prices, Monetary policy and uncertainty JEL Code(s): C, C5, C52, E, E3, E31