This paper investigates the effect of oil price uncertainty on real economic activity using a quarterly VAR with stochastic volatility in mean. Stochastic volatility allows oil price uncertainty to vary separately from changes in the level of oil prices, and thus the impact of oil price...

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...

Recent empirical evidence suggests that private consumption is crowded-in by government spending. This outcome violates existing macroeconomic theory, according to which the negative wealth effect brought about by a rise in public expenditure should decrease consumption. In this paper, we...

This paper empirically investigates the possibility that the effects of shocks to output depend on the level of inflation. The analysis extends Elwood’s (1998) framework by incorporating in the model an inflation-threshold process that can potentially influence the stochastic properties of...

Traditional structural models cannot distinguish whether changes in activity are a function of altered expectations today or lagged responses to past plans. Polynomial-adjustment-cost (PAC) models remove this ambiguity by explicitly separating observed dynamic behaviour into movements that have...

In this paper, we develop a theoretical model which identifies four channels-import prices, competition with domestic suppliers and workers, and commodity prices-through which priceand wage-setting conditions in country j may affect inflation in country i. We estimate a dynamic inflation...

In a recent paper, Chang, Gomes, and Schorfheide (2002) extend the standard real business cycle (RBC) model to allow for a learning-by-doing (LBD) mechanism whereby current labour supply affects future productivity. They show that this feature magnifies the propagation of shocks and improves the...

We document the cyclical behavior of debt, equity, and retained earnings for different firm categories using firm-level Canadian data. There is evidence of both procyclical equity and debt issuance for all firm categories but the timing differs. In particular, there is strong evidence that...

The authors document the out-of-sample forecasting accuracy of the New Keynesian model for Canada. They estimate their variant of the model on a series of rolling subsamples, computing out-of-sample forecasts one to eight quarters ahead at each step. They compare these forecasts with those...

This paper discusses broad trends in labour force participation and part-time employment across different age groups since the Great Recession and uses provincial data to identify changes related to population aging, cyclical effects and other factors. The main population age groups examined are...