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 propose a novel framework to analyze how policy-makers can manage risks to the median projection and risks specific to the tail of gross domestic product (GDP) growth. By combining a quantile regression of GDP growth with a vector autoregression, we show that monetary and macroprudential...

In the United States, 30% of households are coholders who simultaneously borrow on credit cards and hold liquid assets. This generates a rich distribution of gross wealth positions that underpins the distribution of net wealth often used to calibrate macroeconomic models. We show that, beyond...

We investigate the macroeconomic impacts of mothballed businesses-those that closed temporarily-on sectoral equilibrium prices after a negative demand shock. First, we introduce a new establishment-level dataset derived from Google Places. We confirm the importance of temporary closures during...

How should independent central banks react if pressured by fiscal policymakers? We study an environment with strategic monetary-fiscal interactions where the central bank has a limited degree of commitment to follow policies over time and the fiscal authority has none. We contrast the...

The days when secrecy and opacity were the bywords of central banking are gone. The advent of inflation targeting in the early 1990s acted as the catalyst for enhanced transparency and communications in the conduct of monetary policy. In the wake of the 2007 - 09 global financial crisis, this...

Although the concept of monetary policy lag has historical roots deep in the monetary economics literature, relatively little attention has been paid to the idea. In this paper, we build on Svensson's (1997) inflation targeting framework by explicitly taking into account the lagged effect of...

The inflation targeting (IT) regime is 17 years old. With practice of IT now in more than 21 countries, there is enough evidence gathered to take stock of the IT experience. In this paper, we analyze the inflation record of IT central banks. We extend the work of Albagli and Schmidt-Hebbel...

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...

This paper introduces a new methodology to date systemic financial stress events in a transparent, objective and reproducible way. The financial cycle is captured by a monthly country-specific financial stress index. Based on a Markov-switching model, high financial stress regimes are...