Quantifying the effects of monetary policy is challenging and has generated a vast literature in empirical macroeconomics. Much of this literature uses vector autoregressions (VARs), identified with different approaches, and finds that the effects of monetary policy for the U.S. are relatively modest, with peak decline estimates ranging between 0.3 and 1 per cent for output following a 100-basis-point monetary innovation. However, Romer and Romer (2004; R&R henceforth) find much larger effects of U.S. monetary policy shocks using narrative methods. This strategy uses historical records to construct a series of intended interest rate changes at meetings of the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) and then isolate the innovations to these interest rate changes that are orthogonal to the Federal Reserve's information set. A 100-basis-point shock from the R&R shock series translates into output and price level peak declines larger than 4 per cent. The study by Cloyne and Hurtgen (2016) extends the narrative approach to the U.K. and is, to our knowledge, the only one applying narrative methods to a country other than the U.S. Another important body of literature in monetary economics has documented important shifts in the conduct of monetary policy in the U.S. and abroad. Some prominent papers, such as Clarida et al. (2000), document that U.S. monetary policy has become more responsive to expected inflation after the Volcker disinflation. There is also evidence that monetary policy rules in small open economies have also changed significantly. For example, Alstadheim et al. (2013) show that the central banks of the U.K., Sweden and Canada shifted away from responding to exchange rate movements around the 1990s, when these countries implemented inflation-targeting (IT) regimes. Our paper builds on these two strands of literature and applies the narrative approach to Canada, providing new evidence on the macroeconomic effects of monetary policy and highlighting the importance of changes in the conduct of systematic monetary policy. We use historical documents to construct a series of intended changes in the target policy interest rate along with a novel database of real-time data and forecasts assembled from the Bank of Canada's staff economic projections from 1974 to 2015, to isolate the innovations to the intended policy changes that are orthogonal to the policymakers' information set. We find that following a 100-basis-point monetary policy shock, real monthly GDP has a peak decline of 1.0 per cent about 18 to 24 months after the shock and is less than 0.5 per cent lower after three years, while the price level (consumer price index) response is weaker and takes longer to materialize, falling by 0.4 per cent after three years. We show that it is crucial for these results to depart from R&R in two important ways: (i) by controlling for U.S. interest rates as well as the USD/CAD exchange rate in the policy-makers' information set, and (ii) by accounting for the structural break in the conduct of monetary policy caused ...

We study the revision properties of the Bank of Canada's staff output gap estimates since the mid‐1980s and show that the average revision has been significantly smaller since the early 2000s. Alternatively, revisions from econometric output gap estimates have not experienced a similar improvement. We show that the overestimation of potential output in real time following the 1991–92 recession explains the large revisions in the first half of the sample. Although Phillips‐curve inflation forecasts slightly worsen when conditioned on real time instead of final gaps, their relative poor performance reflects the general lack of inflation predictability rather than real‐time gap measurement issues.

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Summary We present a new, publicly available database of real‐time data and forecasts from the Bank of Canada's staff economic projections, which will be updated on an annual basis. We describe the data construct, its variables, coverage, and frequency. We then provide a forecast evaluation for gross domestic product (GDP) growth, consumer price index (CPI) inflation and the policy rate since 1982: We compare the staff's forecasts with those from commonly used time series models estimated with the real‐time data, and with forecasts from other professional forecasters, and provide standard bias tests. Finally, we study changes in predictability of the Canadian economy following the announcement of the inflation‐targeting regime in 1991. Our data set is unprecedented outside the USA, and our evidence is particularly interesting, as it covers over 30 years of staff forecasts, two severe recessions, and different monetary policy regimes.

Continuing a trend of publications investigating sound art within a specific geographical context, this paper proposes an original view of the sound installation practice in Québec. This study is part of a research project aiming at building new theoretical and practical tools for the documentation of such artworks. In this paper we present the outcomes of the first phase and its connection with the bigger picture of the project, which is the questioning of the relevance of spatial audio recordings with six degrees of freedom (6DoF) for mediating the capture of knowledge relating to the sensory experience of a work. During the first phase, we developed a conceptual descriptive framework based on a mixed-methods approach, top-down and bottom-up, consisting in a systematic review of literature paralleled with a categorization of contemporary sound art production in Québec based on publicly available documentation. This process led to a formal and quantitative depiction of the Québec scene, which aims to guide both the selection of case studies for the next phases but also to be part of the conceptual tools for investigating the sensory experience of these works. This quantitative depiction of the scene will thus foster a qualitative investigation of the sensory experience of sound art installations and the knowledge that may be lost in standard written documentation practice with an original methodological framework.