We examine the relative ability of simple inflation targeting (IT) and price level targeting (PLT) monetary policy rules to minimize both inflation variability and business cycle fluctuations in Canada for shocks that have important consequences for global commodity prices. We find that...

Macroeconomists have traditionally ignored the behavior of temporary price markdowns (“sales”) by retailers. Although sales are common in the micro price data, they are assumed to be unrelated to macroeconomic phenomena and generally filtered out. We challenge this view. First, using the...

This paper empirically investigates the possibility that the effects of shocks to output depend on the level of inflation. The analysis extends Elwood’s (1998) framework by incorporating in the model an inflation-threshold process that can potentially influence the stochastic properties of...

I present a structural econometric analysis supporting the hypothesis that money is still relevant for shaping inflation and output dynamics in the United States. In particular, I find that real money balance effects are quantitatively important, although smaller than they used to be in the...

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 authors analyze the welfare implications of simple monetary policy rules in the context of an estimated model of a small open economy for Canada with traded and non-traded goods, and with sticky prices and wages. They find statistically significant heterogeneity in the degree of price...

How important are the benefits of low price-level uncertainty? This paper explores the desirability of price-level path targeting in an estimated DSGE model fit to Canadian data. The policy implications are based on social welfare evaluations. Compared to the historical inflation targeting rule,...

The Survey of Professional Forecasters (SPF) has had vast influence on research related to better understanding expectation formation and the behaviour of macroeconomic agents. Inflation expectations, in particular, have received a great deal of attention, since they play a crucial role in...

We assess the implications of price indexation for estimated frequency of price adjustment in sticky price models of business cycles. These models predominantly assume that non-reoptimized prices are indexed to lagged or average inflation. The assumption of price indexation adds tractability...