Recent vector autoregression (VAR) studies have shown that monetary policy shocks have had a reduced effect on the economy since the beginning of the 1980s. This paper investigates the causes of this change. First, we estimate an identified VAR over the pre- and post-1980 periods, and...

Commodity prices have increased dramatically and persistently over the past several years, followed by a sharp reversal in recent months. These large and persistent movements in commodity prices raise questions about their implications for global inflation. The process of globalization has...

Inventory investment is an important component of the Canadian business cycle. Despite its small average size - less than 1 per cent of output - it exhibits volatile procyclical fluctuations, accounting for almost one-third of output variance. Procyclicality of inventories is somewhat smaller...

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...

This paper studies how banks' balance sheets and funding costs interact in the transmission of monetary-policy rates to banks' credit supply to firms. To do so, we use credit-registry data from Germany and Portugal together with the European Central Bank's policy-rate cuts in mid-2014. The...

We show that, to form aggregate inflation expectations, consumers rely on the price changes they face in their daily lives while grocery shopping. Specifically, the frequency and size of price changes, rather than their expenditure share, matter for individuals’ inflation expectations. To...

We use controlled laboratory experiments to test the causal effects of central bank communication on economic expectations and to distinguish the underlying mechanisms of those effects. In an experiment where subjects learn to forecast economic variables, we find that central bank communication...

In this paper we estimate reduced form investment equations for Finland using aggregate as well as firm-level panel data.We obtain significant estimates of the accelerator and user-cost effects on investment with both aggregate and firm level data, but these effects appear to be stronger at the...

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 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...