Guided by a macroeconomic model in which non-energy commodity prices are endogenously determined, we apply a new factor-based identification strategy to decompose the historical sources of changes in commodity prices and global economic activity. The model yields a factor structure for commodity...

Inflation dynamics in advanced countries have produced two consecutive puzzles during the years after the global financial crisis. The first puzzle emerged when inflation rates over the period 2009-11 were consistently higher than expected, although economic slack in advanced countries reached...

The U.S. Federal Reserve responded to the great recession by reducing policy rates to the effective lower bound. In order to provide further monetary stimulus, they subsequently conducted large-scale asset purchases, quadrupling their balance sheet in the process. We assess the international...

Exports in advanced economies have been relatively sluggish since 2011, growing at a much slower pace than observed before the global financial crisis. In this paper, export-demand equations for a panel of 18 countries in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) are...

In theory, nominal exchange rate movements can lead to “expenditure switching” when they generate changes in the relative prices of goods across countries. This paper explores whether the expenditure-switching role of exchange rates has changed in the current episode of significant global...

Using industry-level data for 22 Canadian manufacturing industries, the authors examine the relationship between exchange rates and investment during the period 1981-97. Their empirical results show that the overall effect of exchange rates on total investment is statistically insignificant....

The authors provide some of the first empirical evidence on labour market adjustments to exchange rate movements in Canadian manufacturing industries. Generalized method of moments estimates that control for endogeneity show that there are significant changes in labour input when a change in the...

The author investigates the quantitative importance of the expenditure-switching effect by developing and estimating a structural sticky-price model nesting both producer currency pricing (PCP) and local currency pricing (LCP) settings. The author aims to provide empirical evidence of the...

Over the past 5 years, real energy and non-energy commodity prices have trended sharply higher. These relative price movements have had important implications for inflation and economic activity in both Canada and the rest of the world. China has accounted for the bulk of incremental demand for...

Using industry-level data for Canadian manufacturing industries from 1981 to 1997, the authors find empirical evidence of a negative relationship between the capital-labour ratio and the user cost of capital relative to the price of labour. A 10 per cent increase in the user cost of the...