This paper is a user' guide to a set of Guss procedures developed at the Bank of Canada for estimating regime-switching models. The procedure can estimate relatively quickly a wide variety of switching models and so should prove useful to the applied researchers. Sample program listings are...

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...

The paper explores the macroeconomic consequences of fiscal consolidations whose timing and composition - either tax- or spending-based - are uncertain. We find that the composition of the fiscal consolidation, its duration, the monetary policy stance, the level of government debt, and...

This paper proposes a theoretical framework to analyze the relationship between credit shocks, firm defaults and volatility, and to study the impact of credit shocks on business cycle dynamics. Firms are identical ex ante but differ ex post due to different realizations of firm-specific...

We construct a small-open-economy, New Keynesian dynamic stochastic general-equilibrium model with real-financial linkages to analyze the effects of financial shocks and macroprudential policies on the Canadian economy. Our model has four key features. First, it allows for non-trivial...

In this paper, we investigate the effects of housing-related tax policy measures on macroeconomic aggregates using a dynamic general-equilibrium model. The model features borrowing and lending across heterogeneous households, financial frictions in the form of collateral constraints tied to...

This report provides a detailed technical description of an updated version of the Terms-of-Trade Economic Model (ToTEM II), which replaced ToTEM (Murchison and Rennison 2006) in June 2011 as the Bank of Canada’s quarterly projection model for Canada. ToTEM has been improved along a number of...

Macroeconomists have traditionally ignored the behavior of temporary price markdowns (“sales”) by retailers. Although sales are common in the micro price data, they are assumed to be unrelated to macroeconomic phenomena and generally filtered out. We challenge this view. First, using the...

Estimating potential output and the output gap - the difference between actual output and its potential - is important for the proper conduct of monetary policy. However, the measurement and interpretation of potential output, and hence the output gap, is fraught with uncertainty, since it is...

The authors describe the key features of a new large-scale Canadian macroeconomic forecasting model developed over the past two years at the Bank of Canada. The new model, called LENS for Large Empirical and Semi-structural model, uses a methodology similar to the Federal Reserve Board’s...