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,...

Compared to its central role in policy discussions in the United States and most other developed countries, the reliability of the measurement of the output gap has attracted relatively little academic study. Furthermore, both the academic literature and the debate among practitioners have...

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...

This paper shows how existing band-pass filtering techniques and their extension can be applied to the common current-analysis problem of estimating current trends or cycles. These techniques give estimates that are “optimal” given the available data, so their standard errors represent a...

Are stock market crashes and rallies related to deviations from the apparent fundamental share price? Using a switching-regression framework, the authors test whether apparent deviations help to predict the regime from which the next period's stock market return is drawn and the magnitude of...

A stable predictive relationship between inflation and the output gap, often referred to as a Phillips curve, provides the basis for countercyclical monetary policy in many models. In this paper, we evaluate the usefulness of alternative univariate and multivariate estimates of the output gap...

This paper presents analytical gradients for a broad class of regime-switching models with Markovian state-transition probabilities. Such models are usually estimated by maximum likelihood methods, which require the derivatives of the likelihood function with respect to the parameter vector....

Policy makers must base their decisions on preliminary and partially revised data of varying reliability. Realistic modeling of data revisions is required to guide decision makers in their assessment of current and future conditions. This paper provides a new framework with which to model data...

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...