E - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics

• World Real Interest Rates: A Global Savings and Investment Perspective

  Staff Working Paper 2007-16 Brigitte Desroches, Michael Francis

  Over the past 15 years, long-term interest rates have declined to levels not seen since the 1970s. This paper explores possible shifts in global savings and investment that have led to this fall in the world real interest rate.

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Topic(s): Interest rates, International topics JEL Code(s): E, E2, E4, F, F3

• Does Indexation Bias the Estimated Frequency of Price Adjustment?

  Staff Working Paper 2007-15 Maral Kichian, Oleksiy Kryvtsov

  We assess the implications of price indexation for estimated frequency of price adjustment in sticky price models of business cycles. These models predominantly assume that non-reoptimized prices are indexed to lagged or average inflation.

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Topic(s): Econometric and statistical methods, Economic models, Inflation and prices JEL Code(s): E, E3, E31, E37

• Optimization in a Simulation Setting: Use of Function Approximation in Debt Strategy Analysis

  Staff Working Paper 2007-13 David Bolder, Tiago Rubin

  The stochastic simulation model suggested by Bolder (2003) for the analysis of the federal government's debt-management strategy provides a wide variety of useful information. It does not, however, assist in determining an optimal debt-management strategy for the government in its current form.

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Topic(s): Debt management, Econometric and statistical methods, Financial markets, Fiscal policy JEL Code(s): C, C0, C1, C14, C15, C5, C51, C52, C6, C61, C65, E, E6, G, G1, H, H6, H63

• Uncollateralized Overnight Loans Settled in LVTS

  Staff Working Paper 2007-11 Scott Hendry, Nadja Kamhi

  Loan-level data on the uncollateralized overnight loan market is generated using payment data from Canada's Large Value Transfer System (LVTS) and a modified version of the methodology proposed in Furfine (1999). There were on average just under 100 loans extended in this market each day from March 2004 to March 2006 for a total daily value of about $5 billion.

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Topic(s): Financial markets, Interest rates JEL Code(s): E, E4, E44, E5, E50, G, G1, G12

• Do We Need the IMF to Resolve a Crisis? Lessons from Past Episodes of Debt Restructuring

  Staff Working Paper 2007-10 Philipp Maier

  This study investigate how debt restructurings have evolved over the decades. Debtors and creditors have a long history of engaging an outsider – a “third party”, such as the IMF – to organise and facilitate debt restructurings.

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Topic(s): Financial stability, International topics JEL Code(s): E, E5, F, F3, N, N1, N2

• Evaluating Forecasts from Factor Models for Canadian GDP Growth and Core Inflation

  Staff Working Paper 2007-8 Frédérick Demers, Calista Cheung

  This paper evaluates the performance of static and dynamic factor models for forecasting Canadian real output growth and core inflation on a quarterly basis. We extract the common component from a large number of macroeconomic indicators, and use the estimates to compute out-of-sample forecasts under a recursive and a rolling scheme with different window sizes.

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Topic(s): Econometric and statistical methods JEL Code(s): C, C3, C32, E, E3, E37

• Technology Shocks and Business Cycles: The Role of Processing Stages and Nominal Rigidities

  Staff Working Paper 2007-7 Louis Phaneuf, Nooman Rebei

  This paper develops and estimates a dynamic general equilibrium model that realistically accounts for an input-output linkage between firms operating at different stages of processing. Firms face technological change which is specific to their processing stage and charge new prices according to stage-specific Calvo-probabilities.

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

• Monetary Policy Committees in Action: Is There Room for Improvement?

  Staff Working Paper 2007-6 Philipp Maier

  More than 80 central banks use a committee to take monetary policy decisions. The composition of the committee and the structure of the meeting can affect the quality of the decision making.

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Topic(s): Central bank research, Monetary policy framework JEL Code(s): C, C9, C92, D, D7, D70, E, E5, E58

• Time-Consistent Control in Non-Linear Models

  Staff Working Paper 2007-3 Steve Ambler, Florian Pelgrin

  We show how to use optimal control theory to derive optimal time-consistent Markov-perfect government policies in nonlinear dynamic general equilibrium models, extending the result of Cohen and Michel (1988) for models with quadratic objective functions and linear dynamics. We replace private agents' costates by flexible functions of current states in the government's maximization problem.

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Topic(s): Fiscal policy, Monetary policy framework JEL Code(s): C, C6, C63, E, E6, E61, E62

• Housing Market Cycles and Duration Dependence in the United States and Canada

  Staff Working Paper 2007-2 Rose Cunningham, Ilan Kolet

  Housing wealth is a large component of total wealth and plays an important role in aggregate business cycles. In this paper, we explore data on real house price cycles at the aggregate level and city level for the United States and Canada.

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Topic(s): Business fluctuations and cycles, Econometric and statistical methods JEL Code(s): C, C4, C41, E, E3, E32, R, R2, R21