Recent events highlight the importance of understanding the relationship between credit availability and real economic activity. This paper estimates macroeconomic models for Canada to investigate the relationship between changes in non-price lending standards, business loans and output. We ask...

Recent events highlight the importance of understanding the relationship between credit availability and real economic activity. This paper estimates macroeconomic models for Canada to investigate the relationship between changes in non-price lending standards, business loans and output. We ask...

This paper examines past evidence of prolonged periods of foreign exchange reserves accumulation in the Asia-Pacific region. Several proxies for this unobserved variable are considered, including a newly proposed one based on a factor model. We focus on identifying periods of prolonged...

This paper examines the policy rate recommendations of the Bank of Canada’s Governing Council (GC) and the C.D. Howe Institute’s (CDHI) Monetary Policy Council (MPC) since 2003. We find, first, that differences in the median recommendations between the MPC and the GC are persistent but small...

The U.S. recovery from the Great Recession has been slow relative to other postwar-era recoveries in the United States. Encouraged by loose lending standards in the pre-crisis period, U.S. households took on unsustainable amounts of debt, making them vulnerable to adverse shocks. Subsequently, a...

This paper surveys three types of monetary arrangements. It considers how the choice of an exchange rate regime, the degree of central bank independence, or choice of currency unions or boards depends not only on economic considerations but also on political economy considerations. In economic...

This paper compares Hungary’s experience with sterilization with that of other capital inflow episodes. The study focuses on the short-run impact of sterilization on monetary policy. The empirical data indicate that sterilized interventions by the National Bank of Hungary (NBH) were not...

We present the current Italian economic crisis as a phase of a major systemic decline. We argue that “Italy’s system” has forced the country to abandon a “dynamic” view of comparative advantage, crucial for sustained economic growth, in favour of a “static” view of specialization....

This study examines the gender gaps in average hourly wages facing private sector full time employees in the Canadian provinces, using data from the Canadian Labour Force Survey. Over the 1997-2014 period, all provinces have made progress toward narrowing the gender wage gap, though notably...