Browse research

The ongoing review of the IMF, initiated in 2005 by Managing Director De Rato, presents an excellent opportunity to re-examine the role, functions and governance of the Fund.

Using data for 14 countries over the 1994 to 2005 period, we assess the leading indicator properties of gold at horizons ranging from 6 to 24 months.

We develop a five-region version (Canada, an oil exporter, the United States, emerging Asia and Japan plus the euro area) of the Global Economy Model (GEM) encompassing production and trade of crude oil, and use it to study the international transmission mechanism of shocks that drive oil prices.

This paper examines the role of monetary policy in an environment with aggregate risk and incomplete markets. In a two-period overlapping-generations model with aggregate uncertainty and nominal bonds, optimal monetary policy attains the ex-ante Pareto optimal allocation.

The inflation targeting (IT) regime is 17 years old. With practice of IT now in more than 21 countries, there is enough evidence gathered to take stock of the IT experience. In this paper, we analyze the inflation record of IT central banks.

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.

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.

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.

For stationary transformations of variables, there exists a maximum horizon beyond which forecasts can provide no more information about the variable than is present in the unconditional mean. Meteorological forecasts, typically excepting only experimental or exploratory situations, are not reported beyond this horizon; by contrast, little generally accepted information about such maximum horizons is available for economic variables.

Over the past 25 years, world long-term interest rates have declined to levels not seen since the 1960s. This decline has been accompanied by falling world investment and savings rates. The authors explore global saving and investment outcomes that have led to the fall in the world real interest rate. The results show that the key factors explaining movements in savings and investment are variables that evolve relatively slowly over time, such as labour force growth and the age structure of the world economy. The conclusions suggest that, over the coming years, it is unlikely that these slowly changing variables will be a source of significant changes in world real interest rates.