Productivity growth is carefully scrutinized by macroeconomists because it plays key roles in understanding private savings behaviour, the sources of macroeconomic shocks, the evolution of international competitiveness and the solvency of public pension systems, among other things. However,...

An extension of Hamilton's Markov switching techniques (Hamilton, J. B., 1989, A new approach to the economic analysis of nonstationary time series and the business cycle, Econometrica, 57, 357-84) is used to describe and analyse stock market returns. Using new tests, very strong evidence is...

There is no shortage of opinions and discussion about recent productivity growth trends. In contrast, relatively little attention is paid to the degree of uncertainty surrounding recent estimates of such growth trends. This paper makes two contributions to the scant body of research that...

For more than a decade, debates over the impact of new information technologies on trend productivity growth rates have played a key role in the formulation of monetary policy in many countries, including the United States and Canada. However, the question of whether the trend growth rate of...