E - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics

• Nominal Rigidities and Monetary Policy in Canada Since 1981

  Staff Working Paper 2002-25 Ali Dib

  This paper develops and estimates a dynamic, stochastic, general-equilibrium model with price and wage stickiness to analyze monetary policy in Canada.

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Topic(s): Monetary policy framework JEL Code(s): E, E3, E31, E32, E5, E52

• How to Improve Inflation Targeting at the Bank of Canada

  Staff Working Paper 2002-23 Nicholas Rowe

  This paper shows that if the Bank of Canada is optimally adjusting its monetary policy instrument in response to inflation indicators to target 2 per cent inflation at a two-year horizon, then deviations of inflation from 2 per cent represent the Bank's forecast errors, and should be uncorrelated with its information set, which includes two-year lagged values of the instrument and the indicators. Positive or negative correlations are evidence of systematic errors in monetary policy.

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Topic(s): Inflation targets, Monetary and financial indicators, Monetary policy implementation JEL Code(s): E, E5

• The Usefulness of Consumer Confidence Indexes in the United States

  Staff Working Paper 2002-22 Brigitte Desroches, Marc-André Gosselin

  This paper assesses the usefulness of consumer confidence indexes in forecasting aggregate consumer spending in the United States.

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Topic(s): Domestic demand and components, Economic models, International topics JEL Code(s): D, D1, D12, E, E2, E21, E27

• Entrepreneurial Risk, Credit Constraints, and the Corporate Income Tax: A Quantitative Exploration

  Staff Working Paper 2002-21 Césaire Meh

  This paper describes the positive effect that corporate income tax has on capital formation in the presence of liquidity constraints and uninsurable risk.

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Topic(s): Economic models, Fiscal policy JEL Code(s): D, D3, D31, E, E6, E62, H, H2, H20, H23

• Evaluating the Quarterly Projection Model: A Preliminary Investigation

  Staff Working Paper 2002-20 Robert Amano, Kim McPhail, Hope Pioro, Andrew Rennison

  This paper summarizes the results of recent research evaluating the Bank of Canada's Quarterly Projection Model (QPM).

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Topic(s): Economic models JEL Code(s): C, C5, C52, E, E1, E17, E3, E30, E37

• Dollarization in Canada: The Buck Stops There

  Technical Report No. 90 John Murray, James Powell

  The sharp depreciation of the Canadian dollar and the successful launch of the euro have spawned an animated debate in Canada concerning the potential benefits of formally adopting the U.S. dollar as our national currency.

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Technical reports Topic(s): Exchange rate regimes JEL Code(s): E, E3, E32, F, F3, F33, F36

• Estimates of the Sticky-Information Phillips Curve for the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom

  Staff Working Paper 2002-19 Hashmat Khan, Zhenhua Zhu

  Mankiw and Reis (2001a) have proposed a "sticky-information"-based Phillips curve (SIPC) to address some of the concerns with the "sticky-price"-based new Keynesian Phillips curve.

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Topic(s): Economic models, Inflation and prices JEL Code(s): E, E3, E31

• Estimated DGE Models and Forecasting Accuracy: A Preliminary Investigation with Canadian Data

  Staff Working Paper 2002-18 Kevin Moran, Veronika Dolar

  This paper applies the hybrid dynamic general-equilibrium, vector autoregressive (DGE-VAR) model developed by Ireland (1999) to Canadian time series.

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Topic(s): Business fluctuations and cycles, Economic models JEL Code(s): E, E3, E32, E37

• Corporate Bond Spreads and the Business Cycle

  Staff Working Paper 2002-15 Zhiwei Zhang

  This paper examines the predictive power of credit spreads from the corporate bond market. The high-yield bond spread and investment-grade spread can explain 68 per cent and 42 per cent of output variations one year ahead, while the term spread based on government debts can explain only 12 per cent of them.

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Topic(s): Financial markets, Monetary and financial indicators, Monetary policy transmission JEL Code(s): E, E3, E5, G, G1

• Entrepreneurship, Inequality, and Taxation

  Staff Working Paper 2002-14 Césaire Meh

  This paper confirms the conjecture that the evaluation of tax policy leads to very different conclusions once the role of entrepreneurs is considered. Contrary to previous literature, the author finds that switching from a progressive to a proportional income tax system has a negligible effect on wealth inequality in the United States.

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Topic(s): Economic models, Fiscal policy JEL Code(s): D, D3, D31, E, E6, E62, H, H2, H20, H23