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....

This paper compares the performance of simple inflation targeting (IT) and price-level path targeting (PLPT) rules to stabilize the macroeconomy, in response to a series of shocks, similar to those seen in Canada and the United States over the 1983 to 2004 period. The analysis is conducted in a...

We forecast recessions in Canada using an autoregressive (AR) probit model. In this model, the presence of the lagged latent variable, which captures the autocorrelation in the recession binary variable, results in an intractable likelihood with a high dimensional integral. Therefore, we employ...

We propose a new empirical framework that jointly decomposes the conditional variance of economic time series into a common and a sector-specific uncertainty component. We apply our framework to a large dataset of disaggregated industrial production series for the US economy. Our results...

Using identification-robust methods, the authors estimate and evaluate for Canada and the United States various classes of inflation equations based on generalized structural Calvo-type models. The models allow for different forms of frictions and vary in their assumptions regarding the type of...

Weak identification is likely to be prevalent in multi-equation macroeconomic models such as in dynamic stochastic general equilibrium setups. Identification difficulties cause the breakdown of standard asymptotic procedures, making inference unreliable. While the extensive econometric...

Real wage rigidities have recently been proposed as a way of building intrinsic persistence in inflation within the context of New Keynesian Phillips Curves. Using two recent illustrative structural models, we evaluate empirically the importance of real wage rigidities in the data and the extent...

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...

Using a novel dataset for the US states, this paper examines whether household debt and the protracted debt deleveraging help explain the dismal performance of US consumption since 2007, in the aftermath of the housing bubble. By separating the concepts of deleveraging and debt overhang - a flow...