The author provides an overview of the 1975–78 Anti-Inflation Program (AIP), in a background document prepared for a seminar organized by the Bank of Canada to mark the AIP's 30th anniversary. After reviewing Canada's experience with, and policy response to, inflation in the decade preceding...

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...

This paper uses Tobit models and data for union contracts to examine the extent of downward nominal-wage rigidity in Canada. To be consistent with important stylized facts, the models allow the variance of the notional wage-change distribution to be time-varying and test for menu-cost effects....

We build an otherwise-standard business cycle model with housework, calibrated consistently with data on time use, in order to discipline consumption-hours complementarity and relate its strength to the size of fiscal multipliers. We show that if substitutability between home and market goods is...

A recent paper has suggested there might be a trade-off between inflation and unemployment at low inflation rates and this has led some economists to recommend that Canada increase its inflation rate. Underlying this view is the idea that, because firms are reluctant to cut workers' nominal...

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...

Inflation-targeting central banks around the world often state their inflation objectives with regard to the consumer price index (CPI). Yet the literature on optimal monetary policy based on models with nominal rigidities and more than one sector suggests that CPI inflation is not always the...

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...

The authors investigate the implications of house-price bubbles for the optimal inflation-target horizon using a dynamic general-equilibrium model with credit frictions, house-price bubbles, and small open-economy features. They find that, given the distribution of shocks and inflation...

Since the work of Doepke and Schneider (2006a) and Meh and Terajima (2008), we know that inflation causes major redistribution of wealth - between households and the government, between nationals and foreigners, and between households within the same country. Two types of monetary policy,...