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...

This paper investigates the determinants of corporate risk taking. Shareholders with substantial equity ownership in a single company may advocate conservative investment policies due to greater exposure to firm risk. Using a large cross-country sample, I find a positive relationship between...

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...

The literature on market timing of long-term debt issuance yields mixed evidence that managers can successfully time their debt-maturity issuance. The early results that are indicative of debt-maturity timing are not robust to accounting for structural breaks or to other measures of debt...

The purpose of our paper is to examine the profitability and social desirability of both domestic and foreign mergers in a location-quantity competition model, where we allow for the possibility of hollowing-out of the target firm. We refer to hollowing-out as the situation where the target firm...

The Bank of Canada's version of the Global Economy Model (BoC-GEM) is derived from the model created at the International Monetary Fund by Douglas Laxton (IMF) and Paolo Pesenti (Federal Reserve Bank of New York and National Bureau of Economic Research). The GEM is a dynamic stochastic...

The authors explore the usefulness of macroeconomic models in analyzing global economic developments by examining movements in commodity prices between July 2007 and July 2008. They use the Bank of Canada's version of the Global Economy Model and investigate the longerterm outlook for commodity...

The author examines the global impact of U.S. fiscal policy using the Bank of Canada's Global Economy Model (Lalonde and Muir 2007). In particular, she examines the global macroeconomic implications of the expiration of major tax cuts in the United States and of expected increases in U.S....

Commodity prices have increased dramatically and persistently over the past several years, followed by a sharp reversal in recent months. These large and persistent movements in commodity prices raise questions about their implications for global inflation. The process of globalization has...

The first step in designing effective policies to stabilize an economy is to understand business cycles. No country is isolated from the world economy and external shocks are becoming increasingly important. The author documents the sources of macroeconomic fluctuations in 22 emerging-market...