An emerging view of business cycles from the news-shock literature suggests that recessions may occur when agents depress their demand for new capital upon the realization that they have accumulated too much conditional on current information. In this paper I use a New Keynesian model with a...

In this paper I apply the work of Abrams and Iossifov (2006) to monetary policy in canada to see if same political party affiliation is needed to produce evidence of political opportunism. After modifying their anaylsis to maintain consistency in the time series dimensions of their variables for...

This paper focuses on whether monetary policy has asymmetric effects. By building on the Markov switching model introduced by Hamilton (1989), we examine questions like: Does monetary policy have the same effect regardless of the current phase of economic fluctuations? Given that the economy is...

This essay surveys and evaluates Cuba’s economic performance since its economic “melt-down” of 1989-1993, outlines the government’s policy responses, and explores Cuba’s economic prospects. By 1995, the Cuban economy began to recover with some positive results but also with continuing...

In this paper Engel-Granger time series methodology is used to combine trending economic variables with stationary political factors to search for well-defined political influences on central government budgets in Canada over the entire post-Confederation time period from 1870 to 2000. To...