In this paper, the authors propose a measure of underlying inflation for Canada obtained from estimating a monthly factor model on individual components of the CPI. This measure, labelled the common component of CPI, has intuitive appeal and a number of interesting features. In particular, it is...

The U.S. Energy Information Administration regularly publishes short-term forecasts of the price of crude oil. Traditionally, such out-of-sample forecasts have been largely judgmental, making them difficult to replicate and justify, and not particularly successful when compared with naive...

We examine the evolution of the effects of monetary policy shocks on the distribution of disaggregate prices and quantities of personal consumption expenditures to assess the contribution of monetary policy to changes in U.S. inflation dynamics. Given that the transmission of monetary policy to...

This paper studies the effects of a monetary policy expansion in the United States during times of high financial stress. The analysis is carried out by introducing a smooth transition factor model where the transition between states "normal" and high financial stress) depends on a financial...

Interest rates in China are composed of a mix of both market-determined interest rates (interbank rates and bond yields), and regulated interest rates (retail lending and deposit rates), reflecting China's gradual process of interest rate liberalization. This paper investigates the main drivers...

We explore the macroeconomic effects of a compression in the long-term bond yield spread within the context of the Great Recession of 2007-2009 via a time-varying parameter structural VAR model. We identify a 'pure' spread shock defined as a shock that leaves the policy rate unchanged, which...

We introduce a flexible, time-varying network model to trace the propagation of interest rate surprises across different maturities. First, we develop a novel econometric framework that allows for unknown, potentially asymmetric contemporaneous spillovers across panel units and establish the...

We distinguish between the goods and services sectors in an otherwise standard unobserved components model of US inflation. Our main finding is that, while both sectors used to contribute to the overall variation in aggregate trend inflation, since the 1990s this variation has been driven almost...

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...

We document a strong asymmetry in the evolution of federal funds rate expectations and map this observed asymmetry into measures of monetary policy uncertainty. We show that periods of monetary policy tightening and easing are distinctly related to downside (policy rate is higher than expected)...