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...

The authors provide a detailed technical description of the Terms-of-Trade Economic Model (ToTEM), which replaced the Quarterly Projection Model (QPM) in December 2005 as the Bank's principal projection and policy-analysis model for the Canadian economy. ToTEM is an open-economy, dynamic...

In this paper, the author uses structural vector autoregression methodology to decompose U.S. nominal interest rates into an expected inflation component and an ex ante real interest rate component.

Following the seminal contribution of Kiyotaki and Moore (1997), the role of collateral constraints for business cycle fluctuations has been highlighted by several authors and collateralized debt is becoming a popular feature of business cycle models. In contrast, Kocherlakota (2000) and Cordoba...

We examine the evolution of the effects of monetary policy shocks on the distribution of disaggregate prices and quantities of personal consumption expenditures to assess the contribution of monetary policy to changes in U.S. inflation dynamics. Given that the transmission of monetary policy to...

In many mainstream macroeconomic models, sticky prices play an important role in explaining the effects of monetary policy on the economy. Various theories have been set forth to explain why prices are sticky. This study takes a firm-level survey approach, in a spirit similar to Blinder et al....

The authors explore the usefulness of macroeconomic models in analyzing global economic developments by examining movements in commodity prices between July 2007 and July 2008. They use the Bank of Canada's version of the Global Economy Model and investigate the longerterm outlook for commodity...

The first step in designing effective policies to stabilize an economy is to understand business cycles. No country is isolated from the world economy and external shocks are becoming increasingly important. The author documents the sources of macroeconomic fluctuations in 22 emerging-market...

How do firms adjust prices in the marketplace? Do they tend to adjust prices infrequently in response to changes in market conditions? If so, why? These remain key questions in macroeconomics, particularly for central banks that work to keep inflation low and stable. The authors use the Bank of...