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Understanding Monetary Policy and its Effects: Evidence from Canadian Firms Using the Business Outlook Survey

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  • Matthieu Verstraete
  • Lena Suchanek

Abstract

This paper shows (i) that business sentiment, as captured by survey data, matters for monetary policy decisions in Canada, and (ii) how business perspectives are affected by monetary policy shocks. Measures of business sentiment (soft data) are shown to have systematic explanatory power for monetary policy decisions over and above typical Taylor rule variables. Stronger (weaker) survey results lead to higher (lower) policy rates over the period of study (2001–16). Moreover, we study the effects of monetary policy shocks on firms’ business perspectives using data from the Bank of Canada’s quarterly Business Outlook Survey. The monetary shocks are defined as the fitted residuals of the Taylor rule. Overall, the results are in agreement with the qualitative effects of monetary policy shocks described in the literature. For instance, an unanticipated tightening in monetary policy a year ago (or more) results in firms reporting tighter lending conditions today, as well as slower expected dynamics of future sales, wage growth and output prices. The results are qualitatively similar whether shocks are derived from a standard Taylor rule (hard data) or from an alternative Taylor rule (soft data).

Suggested Citation

  • Matthieu Verstraete & Lena Suchanek, 2017. "Understanding Monetary Policy and its Effects: Evidence from Canadian Firms Using the Business Outlook Survey," Staff Working Papers 17-24, Bank of Canada.
    • Handle: RePEc:bca:bocawp:17-24
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    Cited by:

    1. David Amirault & Naveen Rai & Laurent Martin, 2020. "A Reference Guide for the Business Outlook Survey," Discussion Papers 2020-15, Bank of Canada.

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    More about this item

    Keywords

    Firm dynamics; Interest rates; Transmission of monetary policy;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • D22 - Microeconomics - - Production and Organizations - - - Firm Behavior: Empirical Analysis
    • E52 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Monetary Policy, Central Banking, and the Supply of Money and Credit - - - Monetary Policy
    • E44 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Money and Interest Rates - - - Financial Markets and the Macroeconomy

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