A measure of the neutral policy interest rate can be used to gauge the stance of monetary policy. We define the neutral rate as the real policy rate consistent with output at its potential level and inflation equal to target after the effects of all cyclical shocks have dissipated. This is a...

Forward guidance is one of the policy tools that a central bank can implement if it seeks to provide additional monetary stimulus when it is operating at the effective lower bound (ELB) on interest rates. It became more widely used during and after the global financial crisis. This paper reviews...

This paper assesses the merits of countercyclical bank balance sheet regulation for the stabilization of financial and economic cycles and examines its interaction with monetary policy. The framework used is a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model with banks and bank capital, in which...

A view advanced in the aftermath of the late-2000s financial crisis is that lower than optimal interest rates lead to excessive risk taking by financial intermediaries. We evaluate this view in a quantitative dynamic model in which interest rate policy affects risk taking by changing the amount...

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...

Using Bayesian methods, we estimate a small open economy model in which consumers face limits to credit determined by the value of their housing stock. The purpose of this paper is to quantify the role of collateralized household debt in the Canadian business cycle. Our findings show that the...

We study a model with repeated moral hazard where financial contracts are not fully indexed to inflation because nominal prices are observed with delay as in Jovanovic & Ueda (1997). More constrained firms sign contracts that are less indexed to the nominal price and, as a result, their...

Several authors have presented reduced-form evidence suggesting that the degree of exchange rate pass-through to the consumer price index has declined in Canada since the early 1980s and is currently close to zero. Taylor (2000) suggests that this phenomenon, which has been observed for several...

Recent events in financial markets have underlined the importance of analyzing the link between the financial health of banks and real economic activity. This paper contributes to this analysis by constructing a dynamic general equilibrium model in which the balance sheet of banks affects the...

To investigate the extent to which the transparency of the Bank of Canada's monetary policy has improved, the authors examine empirically - over the period 30 October 2000 to 31 May 2007 - the reaction of Canadian financial markets to official Bank communications, and in particular their...