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...

This paper examines the contributions of population aging, mortgage innovation and historically low interest rates to the sharp rise in U.S. house prices and mortgage debt between 1994 and 2005. I construct an overlapping generations general equilibrium housing model and find that these three...

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....

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...

We study a model with repeated moral hazard where financial contracts are not fully indexed to inflation because nominal prices are observed with delay as in Jovanovic & Ueda (1997). More constrained firms sign contracts that are less indexed to the nominal price and, as a result, their...

This paper examines the relationship between aggregate consumer spending and credit availability in the United States. The author finds that consumer spending falls (rises) in response to a reduction (increase) in credit availability. Moreover, she provides a formal assessment of the possibility...

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...

The authors use the Bank of Canada's version of the Global Economy Model, a multi-country, multi-sector dynamic stochastic general-equilibrium model with an active banking system (the BoC-GEM-FIN), to study the evolution of global current account balances following the recent global financial...