From 1980 until 2007, U.S. average hours worked increased by thirteen percent, due to a large increase in female hours. At the same time, the U.S. labor wedge, measured as the discrepancy between a representative household’s marginal rate of substitution between consumption and leisure and the...

The hypothesis of intertemporal substitution in labour supply has a history of empirical failure when confronted with aggregate time-series data. The authors show that a two-dimensional labour supply model, adapted to an environment with money as originally proposed by Lucas and Rapping (1969)...

From 1870 to 2000, the workweek length of employed persons decreased by 41 per cent in industrialized countries. The employment rate, employment per working age person, displays large movements but no clear secular pattern. This motivated the question: What accounts for the large decrease in the...

This paper analyzes the differences in wage ratios of university graduates to less than university graduates, the education premium, in Canada and the United States from 1980 to 2000. Both countries experienced a similar increase in the fraction of university graduates and a similar increase in...

This paper analyses the Canadian economy for the post 1960 period. It uses an accounting procedure developed in Chari, Kehoe, and McGrattan (2006). The procedure identifies accounting factors that help align the predictions of the neoclassical growth model with macroeconomic variables observed...

This article investigates the stability of Okun's law for Canada and the United States using a time varying parameter approach. Time variation is modeled as driftless random walks and is estimated using the median unbiased estimator approach developed by Stock and Watson (1998). Okun's law...

The authors study the macroeconomic effects of non-zero trend inflation in a simple dynamic stochastic general-equilibrium model with sticky prices. They show that trend inflation leads to a substantial reduction in the stochastic means of output, consumption, and employment. It also leads to an...

In an era when the primary policy instrument is the level of the short-term interest rate, a comparison of that rate with some equilibrium rate can be a useful guide for policy and a convenient method to measure the stance of monetary policy. The real interest rate gap—the difference between...

This paper examines the ability of linear and nonlinear models to replicate features of real Canadian GDP. We evaluate the models using various business-cycle metrics. From the 9 data generating processes designed, none can completely accommodate every business-cycle metric under consideration....

The workhorse DSGE model used for monetary policy evaluation is designed to capture business cycle fluctuations in an optimization-based format. It is commonplace to loglinearize models and express them with variables in deviation-from-steady-state format. Structural parameters are either...