Staff working papers

• Time Variation in Okun's Law: A Canada and U.S. Comparison

  Staff Working Paper 2010-7 Kimberly Beaton

  This article investigates the stability of Okun's law for Canada and the United States using a time varying parameter approach. Time variation is modeled as driftless random walks and is estimated using the median unbiased estimator approach developed by Stock and Watson (1998).

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Topic(s): Business fluctuations and cycles, Labour markets JEL Code(s): E, E2, E24, J, J0, J00

• 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

• What Drives Exchange Rates? New Evidence from a Panel of U.S. Dollar Bilateral Exchange Rates

  Staff Working Paper 2010-5 Jean-Philippe Cayen, Donald Coletti, René Lalonde, Philipp Maier

  We use a novel approach to identify economic developments that drive exchange rates in the long run. Using a panel of six quarterly U.S. bilateral real exchange rates – Australia, Canada, the euro, Japan, New Zealand and the United Kingdom – over the 1980-2007 period, a dynamic factor model points to two common factors.

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Topic(s): Econometric and statistical methods, Exchange rates JEL Code(s): J, J3, J31

• 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

• Corporate Risk Taking and Ownership Structure

  Staff Working Paper 2010-3 Teodora Paligorova

  This paper investigates the determinants of corporate risk taking. Shareholders with substantial equity ownership in a single company may advocate conservative investment policies due to greater exposure to firm risk.

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Topic(s): Financial markets, International topics JEL Code(s): G, G3, G31, G34

• Labour Reallocation, Relative Prices and Productivity

  Staff Working Paper 2010-2 Shutao Cao, Danny Leung

  This paper documents the rate at which labour flows between industries and between firms within industries using the most recent data available. It examines the determinants of these flows and their relationship with the productivity growth.

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Topic(s): Inflation and prices, Labour markets, Productivity JEL Code(s): D, D2, D23, E, E3, E32, J, J6

• Search Frictions and Asset Price Volatility

  Staff Working Paper 2010-1 B. Ravikumar, Enchuan Shao

  We examine the quantitative effect of search frictions in product markets on asset price volatility. We combine several features from Shi (1997) and Lagos and Wright (2002) in a model without money. Households prefer special goods and general goods.

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Topic(s): Financial markets, Market structure and pricing JEL Code(s): E, E4, E44, G, G1, G12

• Real and Nominal Frictions within the Firm: How Lumpy Investment Matters for Price Adjustment

  Staff Working Paper 2009-36 Michael K. Johnston

  Real rigidities are an important feature of modern sticky price models and are policy-relevant because of their welfare consequences, but cannot be structurally identified from time series. I evaluate the plausibility of capital specificity as a source of real rigidities using a two-dimensional generalized (s,S) model calibrated to micro evidence.

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Topic(s): Monetary policy transmission JEL Code(s): E, E1, E12, E2, E22, E3, E31

• Estimating DSGE-Model-Consistent Trends for Use in Forecasting

  Staff Working Paper 2009-35 Jean-Philippe Cayen, Marc-André Gosselin, Sharon Kozicki

  The workhorse DSGE model used for monetary policy evaluation is designed to capture business cycle fluctuations in an optimization-based format. It is commonplace to log-linearize models and express them with variables in deviation-from-steady-state format.

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Topic(s): Business fluctuations and cycles, Econometric and statistical methods JEL Code(s): C, C3, C32, E, E3, E5, E52

• A Consistent Test for Multivariate Conditional Distributions

  Staff Working Paper 2009-34 Fuchun Li, Greg Tkacz

  We propose a new test for a multivariate parametric conditional distribution of a vector of variables y_t given a conditional vector x_t.

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Topic(s): Econometric and statistical methods JEL Code(s): C, C1, C12, C2, C22