The Canadian economy faces serious short-term macroeconomic challenges, the most important of which is addressing the burden of our slow-growth recovery. The sources and consequences of this slow growth are the focus of this Commentary. Canadian monetary policy has little ability to further...

The purpose of this paper is to present an approach with regard to the dynamic process of the general equilibrium during the business cycle fluctuations following monetary and fiscal interventions, which, I think, could contribute to bridging the differences between the different schools of...

Do the prevailing unusually and persistently low real interest rates reflect a decline in the natural rate of interest as commonly thought? We argue that this is only part of the story. The critical role of financial factors in influencing medium-term economic fluctuations must also be taken...

Prevailing explanations of the decline in real interest rates since the early 1980s are premised on the notion that real interest rates are driven by variations in desired saving and investment. But based on data stretching back to 1870 for 19 countries, our systematic analysis casts doubt on...

Over the course of U.S. history there have been a small number of occasions in which aggregate nominal spending has declined, the most recent of which occurred during the recession that began in December 2007. Coincident with these observed declines in nominal spending are declines in the...

Macroeconomic models with microeconomic foundations face a difficult task: they must be consistent with facts both large and small. This paper proposes a model that combines two strands of the literature on stickiness in order to match both sets of facts. (1) Firms acquire information...

Since Barnett derived the user cost price of money, the economic theory of monetary services aggregation has been developed and extended into a field of its own with solid foundations in microeconomic theory. Divisia monetary aggregates have repeatedly been shown to be strictly preferable to...

The term “Say’s Law” was introduced in the twentieth century by an American economist, Fred Manville Taylor. To this date, no research has thoroughly investigated how the term came to be and what it really meant in Taylor’s writings. This paper aims to examine how Taylor defined and used...

A crisis is but a crisis when the long run outlook is definitively positive. Then a lower turning point must exist. This implicates a vision or, in the ideal case, a formalized theory of the money economy's possible end states. This theory has to provide an endogenous explanation of end states...

This paper aims to evaluate if frictions in credit markets are important for business cycles in the U.S. and the Euro area. For this purpose, I modify the DSGE financial accelerator model developed by Bernanke, Gertler and Gilchrist (1999) by adding frictions such as price indexation to past...