This paper examines the role of bank credit in modeling and forecasting business cycle fluctuations, and investigates the international transmission of US credit shocks, using a global vector autoregressive (GVAR) framework and associated country-specific error correction models. The paper...

An important issue in the debate over the desirability of freer capital mobility for developing countries is whether capital flows have significant effects on economic growth. Proponents of capital account liberalization cite the growth-promoting attributes of capital inflows as a key benefit of...

In an overlapping-generations model that represents a small open economy, where agents live two periods, liquidity constraints lead to low economic development when the only accumulable factor is human capital. In the context of multiple equilibria, an underdevelopment trap can result in which...

This study has two aspects. First, the author examines the theoretical properties of the constant elasticity of substitution (CES) production function and the implications of this formulation for the properties of a structural macroeconomic model. He then seeks to determine whether Canadian...

The authors provide an extensive review of the rapidly expanding research on productivity, both at the macro and micro levels. They focus primarily on papers written about Canada, but also draw on selected studies from other countries, especially the United States, where such work sheds...

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...

The international business cycle is very important for Latin America’s economic performance as the recent global crisis vividly illustrated. This paper investigates how changes in trade linkages between China, Latin America, and the rest of the world have altered the transmission mechanism of...

This paper proposes a Markov-switching framework to endogenously identify the following: (1) regimes where economies synchronously enter recessionary and expansionary phases; and (2) regimes where economies are unsynchronized, essentially following independent business cycles. The reliability of...

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...