In this work, we use novel Canadian survey data to study how expectations of future changes in house prices are influenced by personal experiences. We find that recently experienced changes in local house prices are routinely extrapolated into expectations of year-ahead changes in national house prices.
The Bank of Canada recently launched a quarterly survey to measure the expectations of Canadian households: the Canadian Survey of Consumer Expectations (CSCE). The data collected provide comprehensive information about consumer expectations for and uncertainty about inflation, the labour market and household finance. This article describes the CSCE and illustrates its potential to offer rich information about Canadian consumers for researchers and policy-makers.
This paper evaluates the usefulness of various measures of core inflation for the conduct of monetary policy. Traditional exclusion-based measures of core inflation are found to perform relatively poorly across a range of evaluation criteria, in part due to their inability to filter unanticipated transitory shocks.
In an open economy such as Canada’s, exchange rate movements can have a material impact on consumer prices. This is particularly important in the current context, with the significant depreciation of the Canadian dollar vis-a-vis the U.S. dollar since late 2012.
This article provides a broad perspective on the performance of the labour market in Canada and the United States since the Great Recession. It also presents a simple way to summarize much of this information in a single composite labour market indicator (LMI) for both countries. The LMI suggests that the unemployment rate in Canada has evolved largely in line with overall labour market conditions since the recession, but may have modestly overstated the extent of recent improvement. The U.S. unemployment rate, in contrast, appears to have substantially overstated the post-recession improvement in labour market conditions.
