Canadian economists have devoted some attention to the study of regional cycles. In the Quebec-Ontario case, the "wid ening" hypothesis has emerged as the empirical consensus: this hypot hesis states that the gap between the two regional economies increase s in a recessionary period. This paper...

In this paper, we estimate a fully optimized BVAR model of the Canadian economy for the period 1971-87. The model is well-adapted to the features of a small open economy. We show how it can be used as an input in the monetary policy process either as a forecasting instrument or an analytical...

Since the abandonment of monetary targeting by the Central Banks of major industrial nations, McCallum's rule has attracted renewed attention in the macroeconomic literature. Both McCallum and his critics have investigated the stabilizing properties of the rule and its robustness across regimes...

The work of Robert Hall (1978) on the stochastic implications of the rational expectations-permanent income (RE-PI) theory has initiated numerous empirical analysis. The purpose of this paper is to reexamine this question using the methodology recently proposed by Abel and Mishkin (1983) on a...

In this paper, we estimate a fully optimized BVAR model of the Canadian economy for the period 1971-87. The model is well-adapted to the features of a small open economy. We show how it can be used as an input in the monetary policy process either as a forecasting instrument or an analytical...

To overcome the over-parameterization problems typically associated with the estimation of large VAR systems, Litterman (1979, 1986) and Doan, Litterman, and Sims (1984) have proposed the inclusion of statistical a priori information. In this paper, we investigate how economic a priori...