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...

In this paper, the authors develop a new tool to improve the short-term forecasting of real GDP growth in the euro area and Japan. This new tool, which uses unrestricted mixed-data sampling (U-MIDAS) regressions, allows an evaluation of the usefulness of a wide range of indicators in predicting...

In this paper, the authors propose a measure of underlying inflation for Canada obtained from estimating a monthly factor model on individual components of the CPI. This measure, labelled the common component of CPI, has intuitive appeal and a number of interesting features. In particular, it is...

The author investigates the direct effect of Chinese imported goods on consumer prices in Canada. On average, over the 2001-06 period, the direct effect of consumer goods imported from China is estimated to have reduced the inflation rate by about 0.1 percentage points per year. This...

The authors document the research output of 34 central banks from 1990 to 2003, and use proxies of research inputs to measure the research productivity of central banks over this period. Results are obtained with and without controlling for quality and for policy relevance. The authors find...

The purpose of this study is to empirically analyze the response of Canadian net exports to variations in the Canadian multilateral exchange rate. Economic theory suggests that if the sum of import and export elasticities is greater than one, a real currency depreciation will imply an increase...

This paper assesses the effectiveness and associated externalities that arise when macroprudential policies (MPPs) are used to manage international capital flows. Using a sample of up to 139 countries, we examine the impact of eight different MPP measures on cross-border bank flows over the...

Rising consumer prices may reflect shifts by consumers to new higher-priced products, mostly for durable and semi-durable goods. I apply Bils’ (2009) methodology to newly available Canadian consumer price data for non-shelter goods and services to estimate how price increases can be divided...

This paper investigates the effects of monetary policy on the risk-taking behavior of fixed-income mutual funds in Canada. We consider different measures of the stance of monetary policy and investigate active variation in mutual funds’ risk exposure in response to monetary policy. We find...

In this paper, we provide empirical evidence on the factors that motivated emerging economies to change their capital outflow controls in recent decades. Liberalization of capital outflow controls can allow emerging-market economies (EMEs) to reduce net capital inflow (NKI) pressures, but may...