Over the past 5 years, real energy and non-energy commodity prices have trended sharply higher. These relative price movements have had important implications for inflation and economic activity in both Canada and the rest of the world. China has accounted for the bulk of incremental demand for...

One of the most serious problems that a central bank in an emerging market economy can face is the sudden reversal of capital inflows. Hoarding international reserves can be used to smooth the impact of such reversals, but these reserves are seldom sufficient and always expensive to hold. In...

Drawing on recent business cycle research on the Great Depression, we return to an argument we advanced in a 1996 article in the Journal of Monetary Economics—the argument that features of the Hawley-Smoot tariffs could have done more to decrease economic activity than is customarily believed,...

The recent international financial crisis has highlighted the role of real asset prices in the macroeconomic fluctuations of advanced economies. This paper analyzes the effects of some external and domestic shocks in the real prices of agricultural land in Argentina economy and compared the...

We analyze export price adjustment of Swiss manufacturing firms using a novel data set of matched export, import, and domestic prices. After a large, unexpected, and permanent appreciation of the Swiss franc, export prices set in domestic currency fell less than export prices set in foreign...

This paper presents a flexible-price small open economy model with a "peso problem" in productivity states. Agents rationally adjust their beliefs about future productivity growth after the arrival of news. A downward revision of expectations triggers a Sudden Stop, together with large declines...

There are significant effects of changing demographics on economic indicators: growth in GDP especially, but also the current account balance and gross capital formation. The 15-24 age group appears to be one of the key age groups in these effects, with increases in that age group exerting...

While flexible exchange rates facilitate stabilisation, exchange rate fluctuations can cause real volatility. This gives policy importance to the causal relationship between exchange rate depreciation and its volatility. An exchange rate may be expected to become more volatile when the...

Over the past 5 years, real energy and non-energy commodity prices have trended sharply higher. These relative price movements have had important implications for inflation and economic activity in both Canada and the rest of the world. China has accounted for the bulk of incremental demand for...

This paper studies the dynamics of international consumption risk sharing among the G7 countries. Based on the dynamic conditional correlation model due to Engle (2002), we construct a time-varying, consumption-based measure of risk sharing. We find that although the exposure to country-specific...