La politique monétaire a-t-elle des effets asymétriques sur l'emploi?

Several economists, including Cover (1992), Ammer and Brunner (1995), Macklem, Paquet, and Phaneuf (1996), have worked over the past few years to determine whether monetary policy shocks have asymmetric effects on output. These authors have generally found that negative monetary shocks tend to reduce output growth significantly, and that positive shocks generally have a weaker or even negligible impact.

The goal of this study is to determine whether asymmetric reactions can be observed in the Canadian labour market. Because employment is an important factor in the output process, discovering how this variable reacts to monetary policy shocks could lead to a better understanding of where asymmetric effects on output originate. I have estimated the model in two stages, using the generalized moments method, and have made correction to the variance-covariance matrix of estimators proposed by Newey (1984) in order to take into account the generated regressors.

Overall, the results agree with those of previous output studies, except for employment defined as the number of hours worked per person in each period. The asymmetric effects observed, however, diminish or disappear altogether when other real variables are added to the model.