This paper studies the role of trade in capital goods and investment-specific technical change in the determination of the cross-country correlation of output and the volatility of the terms of trade. The cross-country correlation of output for G7 countries ranges from 0.42 to 0.85 and the...

We study a version of the neoclassical growth model in which shocks to both aggregate productivity and the depreciation of capital generate fluctuations around the steady-state growth path. Depreciation shocks induce an inverse comovement between average labor productivity and hours worked. When...

The principal qualifying condition for welfare in Canada, unlike the US, is financial need - there are no demographic criteria. We use a time-series of annual, national cross-sections for the period 1981 through 1993 to estimate a model of lone-female headship. Our findings do not support the...

Using quarterly national accounts for 19 industrialized economies, the business cycle behavior of trade related aggregates and prices is assessed. Emphasis is put on the distinction between small, relatively open, and large, relatively closed, economies. Comparing those facts with the...

We examine the dual role of labor adjustment costs and staggered wage contracts as endogenous propagation mechanisms. We show that a dynamic general equilibrium model which combines these two features explains the autocorrelation functions of output growth and nominal wage growth, as well as the...

A model is built in which regions with redistributive goals compete to attract mobile firms that provide jobs to their work forces. Regions are inhabited with an immobile population of disabled and able individuals. The aim of each regional government is to provide support for the disabled, who...

We use the returns on a set of international financial securities to identify exogenous shocks to the Canadian federal surplus. We find that a large portion of the variation in the surplus can be replicated by a linear combination of these returns and that the rising debt observed in the 1980s...

This paper gauges consumption and portfolio shares for aggregate assets (i.e. financial, tangible, and human assets) and disaggregated assets (i.e. deposits, stocks, and reserves for life insurance and pensions), rather than traditional underlying pricing implications for stocks. Hence, our...

Several estimation procedures such as the Efficient Method of Moments (EMM) of Gallant and Tauchen (1996) and Indirect Inference procedure of Gouriéroux, Monfort and Renault (1993) involve two models, an auxiliary one and a model of interest. The role played by both models poses challenges and...

Various theories have been put forward to explain the fact that humans experience menopause while virtually no animals do. This paper aims to investigate one such theory: as human babies are usually large and have long gestation periods, a substantial risk of death exists for the mother. It...