A number of central banks publish their own business conditions survey based on non-random sampling methods. The results of these surveys influence monetary policy decisions and thus affect expectations in financial markets. To date, however, no one has computed the statistical accuracy of these...

The good forecasting performance of factor models has been well documented in the literature. While many studies focus on a very limited set of variables (typically GDP and inflation), this study evaluates forecasting performance at disaggregated levels to examine the source of the improved...

We use a novel approach to identify economic developments that drive exchange rates in the long run. Using a panel of six quarterly U.S. bilateral real exchange rates – Australia, Canada, the euro, Japan, New Zealand and the United Kingdom – over the 1980-2007 period, a dynamic factor model...

The workhorse DSGE model used for monetary policy evaluation is designed to capture business cycle fluctuations in an optimization-based format. It is commonplace to loglinearize models and express them with variables in deviation-from-steady-state format. Structural parameters are either...

We propose a new test for a multivariate parametric conditional distribution of a vector of variables yt given a conditional vector xt. The proposed test is shown to have an asymptotic normal distribution under the null hypothesis, while being consistent for all fixed alternatives, and having...

A sequential Monte Carlo method for estimating GARCH models subject to an unknown number of structural breaks is proposed. Particle filtering techniques allow for fast and efficient updates of posterior quantities and forecasts in real time. The method conveniently deals with the path dependence...

Treating imports as intermediate inputs to domestic production, the author adopts the translog function approach to model real gross domestic income (GDI) in Canada over the 1961-2006 period. She explores the role of price ratios, such as terms of trade and the real effective exchange rate, in...

Affine models describe the stylized time-series properties of the term structure of interest rates in a reasonable manner, they generalize relatively easily to higher dimensions, and a vast academic literature exists relating to their implementation. This combination of characteristics makes the...

This paper examines the ability of linear and nonlinear models to replicate features of real Canadian GDP. We evaluate the models using various business-cycle metrics. From the 9 data generating processes designed, none can completely accommodate every business-cycle metric under consideration....

Technological innovations in the financial industry pose major problems for the measurement of monetary aggregates. The authors describe work on a new measure of money that has a more satisfactory means of identifying and removing the effects of financial innovations. The new method...