We examine policy rate recommendations of the Bank of Canada's Governing Council (GC) and its shadow, the C.D. Howe Institute's Monetary Policy Council (MPC). Individual recommendations of the MPC are observed but not those of the GC. Differences in the two committee's recommendations are small...

One way of evaluating how well monetary authorities perform is to provide the public with a regular and independent second opinion. The European Central Bank (ECB) and the Bank of England (BoE) are shadowed by professional and academic economists who provide a separate policy rate recommendation...

This paper uses the credit-friction model developed by C'urdia and Woodford, in a series of papers, as the basis for attempting to mimic the behavior of credit spreads in moderate as well as in times of crisis. We are able to generate movements in representative credit spreads that are, at...

Monetary policy relies on managing the inflation expectations of the public in order to influence prices (inflation). Relying on the South African experience we argue that most of the general public are only exposed to the communication of the South African Reserve Bank (SARB) via the media....

Empirical evidence on the potential impact of central bank policies on government bond yields at the effective lower bound (ELB) is presented for nine economies. We quantify the content of central bank communications and consider international policy spillovers. At the ELB, yields at the...

In this paper we investigate dynamics of global inflation and short-run inflation expectations. We estimate a global vector autoregressive (GVAR) model estimated using Bayesian techniques. We then explore the effect of three source of inflationary pressure that could drive up inflation...

This paper examines the monetary policy transmission mechanism in four systemically important economies. The impact of monetary policy is found to be broadly comparable for China, the US, the Eurozone, and Japan. Identifying a role for the financial sector is essential to unpacking various...

Inflation is a monetary policy outcome, but in the short to medium term, price and wage decisions are co-determined by the public and private sectors. Many central banks have adopted transparency as a strategic policy approach, whereby communication of monetary policy goals is used as a public...

Content analysis is used to analyze 60 years of FOMC minutes. Since there is no unique algorithm to quantify content two different algorithms are applied. Wordscores compares content relative to a chosen benchmark while DICTION is an alternative algorithm that is specifically designed to capture...

There is no consensus over the importance of “global forces” on inflation. This study explores the role of structural breaks in the inflation process, and their timing, whether it is common across countries, and the extent to which ‘global forces' are relevant. Three conclusions stand out....