C - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods

• The Fisher BCPI: The Bank of Canada’s New Commodity Price Index

  Staff Discussion Paper 2010-6 Ilan Kolet, Ryan Macdonald

  The prices of commodities produced in Canada have important implications for the performance of the Canadian economy and the conduct of monetary policy. The authors explain an important change to the methodology used to construct the Bank of Canada commodity price index (BCPI).

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff discussion papers Topic(s): Econometric and statistical methods, Inflation and prices JEL Code(s): C, C1, E, E3

• On the Advantages of Disaggregated Data: Insights from Forecasting the U.S. Economy in a Data-Rich Environment

  Staff Working Paper 2010-10 Nikita Perevalov, Philipp Maier

  The good forecasting performance of factor models has been well documented in the literature. While many studies focus on a very limited set of variables (typically GDP and inflation), this study evaluates forecasting performance at disaggregated levels to examine the source of the improved forecasting accuracy, relative to a simple autoregressive model. We use the latest revision of over 100 U.S. time series over the period 1974-2009 (monthly and quarterly data).

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Topic(s): Econometric and statistical methods, International topics JEL Code(s): C, C5, C50, C53, E, E3, E37, E4, E47

• Market Expectations and Option Prices: Evidence for the Can$/US$ Exchange Rate

  Staff Discussion Paper 2010-2 Alejandro García, Andrei Prokopiw

  Security prices contain valuable information that can be used to make a wide variety of economic decisions. To extract this information, a model is required that relates market prices to the desired information, and that ideally can be implemented using timely and low-cost methods.

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff discussion papers Topic(s): Econometric and statistical methods, Exchange rates, Financial markets JEL Code(s): C, C0, C00, C02, G, G1, G13

• Introducing the Bank of Canada's Projection Model for the Global Economy

  Technical Report No. 99 Jeannine Bailliu, Patrick Blagrave, James Rossiter

  To complement its existing set of tools to analyze and forecast developments in the global economy, the Bank of Canada recently developed a version of the Global Projection Model (GPM) jointly with staff at the International Monetary Fund.

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Technical reports Topic(s): Business fluctuations and cycles, Economic models, International topics JEL Code(s): C, C6, C68, E, E2, E27, E3, E37, F, F0, F01

• Assembling a Real-Financial Micro-Dataset for Canadian Households

  Staff Working Paper 2010-6 Umar Faruqui

  The lack of consolidated Canadian micro data on household balance sheets and expenditures has been an important impediment to empirical research into real-financial linkages in the Canadian household sector. Our paper attempts to fill this data gap by merging household balance sheet data from the Canadian Financial Monitor survey with household expenditure data from the Survey of Household Spending.

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Topic(s): Sectoral balance sheet JEL Code(s): C, C8, C81, D, D1, D10

• Macroprudential Regulation and Systemic Capital Requirements

  Staff Working Paper 2010-4 Céline Gauthier, Alfred Lehar, Moez Souissi

  In the aftermath of the financial crisis, there is interest in reforming bank regulation such that capital requirements are more closely linked to a bank's contribution to the overall risk of the financial system. In our paper we compare alternative mechanisms for allocating the overall risk of a banking system to its member banks.

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Topic(s): Financial stability JEL Code(s): C, C1, C15, C8, C81, E, E4, E44, G, G2, G21