The author constructs a measure of foreign activity that takes into account the composition of foreign demand for Canadian exports. It has a number of interesting features. First, the foreign activity measure captures both the composition of demand in the United States (by including components...

The analysis and forecasting of developments in the U.S. economy have always played a critical role in the formulation of Canadian economic and financial policy. Thus, the Bank places considerable importance on generating internal forecasts of U.S. economic activity as an input to the Canadian...

The early work of Tobin (1958) showed that portfolio allocation decisions can be reduced to a two stage process: first decide the relative allocation of assets across the risky assets, and second decide how to divide total wealth between the risky assets and the safe asset. This so called...

Asymmetric shocks are common in markets; securities' payoffs are not normally distributed and exhibit skewness. This paper studies the portfolio holdings of heterogeneous agents with preferences over mean, variance and skewness, and derives equilibrium prices. A three funds separation theorem...