Given China's complex monetary policy framework, the People's Bank of China's (PBOC) monetary policy rule is difficult to infer from its observed behaviour. In this paper, we adopt a novel approach, using text analytics to estimate and interpret the unknown component in the PBOC's reaction...

High-value payment systems (HVPSs) are typically liquidity-intensive because the payment requests are indivisible and settled on a gross basis. Finding the right order in which payments should be processed to maximize the liquidity efficiency of these systems is an NP-hard combinatorial...

This paper proposes a unique approach to simulate intraday transactions in the Canadian retail payments batch system. Such transactions are currently unobtainable. The simulation procedure, though demonstrated in the realm of payments systems, has tremendous potential for helping with...

How wrong could policymakers be when using linearized solutions to their macroeconomic models instead of nonlinear global solutions? This question became of much practical interest during the Great Recession and the recent zero lower bound crisis. We assess the importance of nonlinearities in a...

Inflation expectations are a key determinant of actual and future inflation and thus matter for the conduct of monetary policy. We study how firms form their inflation expectations using quarterly firm-level data from the Bank of Canada's Business Outlook Survey, spanning the 2001 to 2015...

Press releases announcing and explaining monetary policy decisions play a critical role in the communication strategy of central banks. Because of their market-moving potential, it is particularly important how they are drafted. Often, central banks start from the previous statement and update...

We construct a 23-country panel data set to consider the effect of central bank projections and forward guidance on private-sector forecast disagreement. We find that central bank projections and forward guidance matter mainly for private-sector forecast disagreement surrounding upcoming policy...

We use narrative evidence along with a novel database of real-time data and forecasts from the Bank of Canada's staff economic projections from 1974 to 2015 to construct a new measure of monetary policy shocks and estimate the effects of monetary policy in Canada. We show that it is crucial to...

We compare the Federal Reserve's asset purchase programs with those implemented by the Bank of England and the Swedish Riksbank, and the Swiss National Bank's reserve expansion program. We decompose government bond yields into (i) an expectations component, (ii) a global term premium and (iii) a...

Central banks' forecasts are important monetary policy inputs and tools for central bank communication. We survey the literature on forecasting at the Federal Reserve, European Central Bank, Bank of England and Bank of Canada, focusing especially on recent developments. After describing these...