This paper uses real-time briefing forecasts prepared for the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) to provide estimates of historical changes in the design of U.S. monetary policy and in the implied central-bank target for inflation. Empirical results support a description of policy with an...

In recent years, there has been a lot of interest in Taylor-type rules. Evidence in the literature suggests that Taylor-type rules are optimal in a number of models and are fairly robust across different models. The reaction function in the Bank of Canada's Quarterly Projection Model (QPM) is an...

This paper examines the implications of changes in economic behaviour for simple inflation-forecast–based monetary rules of the type currently used at two inflation-targeting central banks. Three types of changes in economic behaviour are considered, changes that are motivated by developments...

This paper reports on an exploratory application to Canadian data of an approach pioneered by Martin Feldstein (1997, 1999). Feldstein finds that even at low inflation rates there are costs arising from the distortions introduced by the interaction of inflation with the taxation of income from...

In this study we statistically quantify the reactions of Canadian and U.S. interest rates to macroeconomic announcements released in Canada and in the United States. We find that Canadian interest rates react very little to Canadian macroeconomic news and are significantly affected by U.S....

A central bank's main concern is the general direction of future inflation, and not transitory fluctuations of the inflation rate. As a result, this paper is concerned with forecasting a simple measure of the trend of inflation, the eight-quarter CPI-inflation rate. The primary objective is to...

Historical narratives typically associate financial crises with credit expansions and asset price misalignments. The question is whether some combination of measures of credit and asset prices can be used to predict these events. Borio and Lowe (2002) answer this question in the affirmative for...

The goal of this paper is to shed light on the nature of the monetary transmission mechanism. Specifically, we attempt to tackle two problems in standard limited-participation models: (1) the interest rate liquidity effect is not as persistent as in the data; and (2) some nominal variables are...

The authors develop an index of financial stress for the Canadian financial system. Stress is defined as the force exerted on economic agents by uncertainty and changing expectations of loss in financial markets and institutions. It is a continuous variable with a spectrum of values, where...

This paper studies the steady-state costs of inflation in a general-equilibrium model with real per capita output growth and staggered nominal price and wage contracts. Our analysis shows that trend inflation has important effects on the economy when combined with nominal contracts and real...