E - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics
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On the Importance of Sales for Aggregate Price Flexibility
Macroeconomists have traditionally ignored the behavior of temporary price markdowns (“sales”) by retailers. Although sales are common in the micro price data, they are assumed to be unrelated to macroeconomic phenomena and generally filtered out. -
Integrating Uncertainty and Monetary Policy-Making: A Practitioner’s Perspective
This paper discusses how central banking is evolving in light of recent experience, with particular emphasis on the incorporation of uncertainty into policy decision-making. -
The Role of Card Acceptance in the Transaction Demand for Money
The use of payment cards, either debit or credit, is becoming more and more widespread in developed economies. Nevertheless, the use of cash remains significant. -
International Transmission Channels of U.S. Quantitative Easing: Evidence from Canada
The U.S. Federal Reserve responded to the great recession by reducing policy rates to the effective lower bound. In order to provide further monetary stimulus, they subsequently conducted large-scale asset purchases, quadrupling their balance sheet in the process. -
The Neutral Rate of Interest in Canada
A measure of the neutral policy interest rate can be used to gauge the stance of monetary policy. We define the neutral rate as the real policy rate consistent with output at its potential level and inflation equal to target after the effects of all cyclical shocks have dissipated. -
Improving Public Equity Markets? No Pain, No Gain
This paper quantifies the effects of improving public equity markets on macroeconomic aggregates and welfare. I use an open-economy extension of Angeletos (2007), where entrepreneurs face idiosyncratic productivity risk in privately held firms. -
Real-Time Nowcasting of Nominal GDP Under Structural Breaks
This paper provides a framework for the early assessment of current U.S. nominal GDP growth, which has been considered a potential new monetary policy target. The nowcasts are computed using the exact amount of information that policy-makers have available at the time predictions are made. However, real-time information arrives at different frequencies and asynchronously, which poses challenges of mixed frequencies, missing data and ragged edges. -
A New Approach to Infer Changes in the Synchronization of Business Cycle Phases
This paper proposes a Markov-switching framework to endogenously identify the following: (1) regimes where economies synchronously enter recessionary and expansionary phases; and (2) regimes where economies are unsynchronized, essentially following independent business cycles. -
Predicting Financial Stress Events: A Signal Extraction Approach
The objective of this paper is to propose an early warning system that can predict the likelihood of the occurrence of financial stress events within a given period of time. To achieve this goal, the signal extraction approach proposed by Kaminsky, Lizondo and Reinhart (1998) is used to monitor the evolution of a number of economic indicators that tend to exhibit an unusual behaviour in the periods preceding a financial stress event.