We analyse the effects of a price floor on price wars (or deep price cuts) in the retail market for gasoline. Bertrand supergame oligopoly models predict that price wars should last longer in the presence of price floors. In 1996, the introduction of a price floor in the Quebec retail market for...

Work on testing for bubbles has caused much debate, much of which has focussed on methodology. Monte Carlo simulations reported in Evans (1991) showed that standard tests for unit roots and cointegration frequently reject the presence of bubbles even when such bubbles are present by...

This paper is a user's guide to a set of Gauss procedures developed at the Bank of Canada for estimating regime-switching models. The procedures can estimate relatively quickly a wide variety of switching models and so should prove useful to the applied researcher. Sample program listings are...

This paper reconsiders several recently published but controversial results about the behavior of exchange rates. In particular, it explores finite-sample problems in the application of cointegration tests and shows how these may have affected the conclusions of recent research. It also...

Since Kydland and Prescott published their famous article on rules versus discretion in 1977, the literature on the time-inconsistency problem of economic policy expanded rapidly. While much of the literature is highly technical and can seem esoteric, there is generally an underlying...

We document a robust and interesting relationship between the real domestic price of oil and real effective exchange rates for Germany, Japan and the United States. We also offer an explanation why the real oil price captures exogenous terms of trade shocks, and why such shocks could be the most...

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...

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...