Despite various payment innovations, today, cash is still heavily used to pay for low-value purchases. This paper develops a simulation model to test whether standard implications of the theory on cash management and payment choices can explain the use of payment instruments by transaction size....

The stochastic simulation model suggested by Bolder (2003) for the analysis of the federal government's debt-management strategy provides a wide variety of useful information. It does not, however, assist in determining an optimal debt-management strategy for the government in its current form....

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...

The authors extend the well-known Hansen and Jagannathan (HJ) volatility bound. HJ characterize the lower bound on the volatility of any admissible stochastic discount factor (SDF) that prices correctly a set of primitive asset returns. The authors characterize this lower bound for any...

The author develops a strategy for utilizing higher moments and conditioning information efficiently, and hence improves on the variance bounds computed by Hansen and Jagannathan (1991, the HJ bound) and Gallant, Hansen, and Tauchen (1990, the GHT bound). The author's bound incorporates variance...

The financial crisis of 200709 has highlighted the importance of developments in financial conditions for real economic activity. The authors estimate the effect of current and past shocks to financial variables on U.S. GDP growth by constructing two growthbased financial conditions indexes...

I present a structural econometric analysis supporting the hypothesis that money is still relevant for shaping inflation and output dynamics in the United States. In particular, I find that real money balance effects are quantitatively important, although smaller than they used to be in the...

Using Bayesian methods, we estimate a small open economy model in which consumers face limits to credit determined by the value of their housing stock. The purpose of this paper is to quantify the role of collateralized household debt in the Canadian business cycle. Our findings show that the...

There appears to be a disconnect between the importance of the zero bound on nominal interest rates in the real-world and predictions from quantitative DSGE models. Recent economic events have reinforced the relevance of the zero bound for monetary policy whereas quantitative models suggest that...

This paper studies the effects of a monetary policy expansion in the United States during times of high financial stress. The analysis is carried out by introducing a smooth transition factor model where the transition between states (“normal” and high financial stress) depends on a...