Staff discussion papers

• Inventories in ToTEM

  Staff Discussion Paper 2010-9 Oleksiy Kryvtsov, Yang Zhang

  ToTEM – the Bank of Canada’s principal projection and policy-analysis model for the Canadian economy – is extended to include inventories. In the model, firms accumulate inventories of finished goods for their role in facilitating the demand for goods.

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff discussion papers Topic(s): Business fluctuations and cycles, Economic models JEL Code(s): E, E3, E31, E32

• Inventories, Stockouts, and ToTEM

  Staff Discussion Paper 2010-8 Oleksiy Kryvtsov, Yang Zhang

  Inventory investment is an important component of the Canadian business cycle. Despite its small average size – less than 1 per cent of output – it exhibits volatile procyclical fluctuations, accounting for almost one-third of output variance.

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff discussion papers Topic(s): Business fluctuations and cycles, Monetary policy transmission JEL Code(s): E, E3, E31, E32

• Statistical Confidence Intervals for the Bank of Canada's Business Outlook Survey

  Staff Discussion Paper 2010-7 Daniel de Munnik

  While a number of central banks publish their own business conditions indicators that rely on non-random sampling, knowledge about their statistical accuracy has been limited.

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff discussion papers Topic(s): Business fluctuations and cycles, Central bank research, Regional economic developments JEL Code(s): C, C4, C46, C8, C81

• 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

• Relative Price Movements and Labour Productivity in Canada: A VAR Analysis

  Staff Discussion Paper 2010-5 Michael Dolega, David Dupuis, Lise Pichette

  In recent years, the Canadian economy has been affected by strong movements in relative prices brought about by the surging costs of energy and non-energy commodities, with significant implications for the terms of trade, the exchange rate, and the allocation of resources across Canadian sectors and regions.

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff discussion papers Topic(s): Labour markets, Productivity, Recent economic and financial developments JEL Code(s): E, E2, E23, E24, O, O4, O47

• Prospects for Global Current Account Rebalancing

  Staff Discussion Paper 2010-4 Kimberly Beaton, Carlos De Resende, René Lalonde, Stephen Snudden

  The authors use the Bank of Canada's version of the Global Economy Model, a multi-country, multi-sector dynamic stochastic general-equilibrium model with an active banking system (the BoC-GEM-FIN), to study the evolution of global current account balances following the recent global financial crisis.

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff discussion papers Topic(s): Balance of payments and components, Business fluctuations and cycles, International topics, Recent economic and financial developments JEL Code(s): E, E2, E21, F, F0, F01, F3, F32

• Le pouvoir de prévision des indices PMI

  Staff Discussion Paper 2010-3 Claudia Godbout, Jocelyn Jacob

  The forecast of world economic growth plays a key role in the conduct of Canadian monetary policy. In this context, the authors study the usefulness of the monthly Purchasing Managers’ Indexes (PMIs) in predicting short-term real GDP growth in the euro area, Japan, the United Kingdom, and China, as well as in the world economy.

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff discussion papers Topic(s): Business fluctuations and cycles, International topics JEL Code(s): E, E3, E37, F, F4, F47

• 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

• The Power of Many: Assessing the Economic Impact of the Global Fiscal Stimulus

  Staff Discussion Paper 2010-1 Carlos De Resende, René Lalonde, Stephen Snudden

  The Bank of Canada Global Economy Model (BoC-GEM) is used to examine the effect of various types of discretionary fiscal policies on different regions of the globe. The BoC-GEM is a microfounded dynamic stochastic general-equilibrium global model with six regions, multiple sectors, and international linkages.

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff discussion papers Topic(s): Business fluctuations and cycles, Fiscal policy, International topics, Recent economic and financial developments JEL Code(s): E, E5, E52, E58, E6, E61, E63, F, F4, F42

• Regulatory Constraints on Bank Leverage: Issues and Lessons from the Canadian Experience

  Staff Discussion Paper 2009-15 Étienne Bordeleau, Allan Crawford, Christopher Graham

  The Basel capital framework plays an important role in risk management by linking a bank's minimum capital requirements to the riskiness of its assets. Nevertheless, the risk estimates underlying these calculations may be imperfect, and it appears that a cyclical bias in measures of risk-adjusted capital contributed to procyclical increases in global leverage prior to the recent financial crisis.

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff discussion papers Topic(s): Financial institutions, Financial stability, Financial system regulation and policies JEL Code(s): G, G0, G01, G2, G21, G28