Staff working papers

How can policy-makers avoid large policy errors when they are uncertain about the true model of the economy?

The authors analyze the welfare implications of simple monetary policy rules in the context of an estimated model of a small open economy for Canada with traded and non-traded goods, and with sticky prices and wages.

In the United States, the Federal Reserve has a dual mandate of promoting stable inflation and maximum employment. Since the Fed directly controls only one instrument - the federal funds rate - the authors argue that the Fed's priorities continuously alternate between inflation and economic activity.

The author provides a statistical evaluation of various measures of core inflation for Canada.

The authors estimate a sticky-price dynamic stochastic general-equilibrium model with a financial accelerator, à la Bernanke, Gertler, and Gilchrist (1999), to assess the importance of financial frictions in the amplification and propagation of the effects of transitory shocks.

Traders using the electronic limit order book in the foreign exchange market can watch the posted price and depth of the best quotes change over the day.

Many countries prohibit large shareholdings in their domestic banks.The authors examine whether such a restriction restrains competition in a duopolistic loan market. Blockholders may influence managers' output decisions by choosing capital structure, as in Brander and Lewis (1986).

Financial innovations and the removal of the reserve requirements in the early 1990s have made the distinction between demand and notice deposits arbitrary.

Suppose that the dynamics of the macroeconomy were given by (partly) random fluctuations between two equilibria: "good" and "bad."

The authors document the out-of-sample forecasting accuracy of the New Keynesian model for Canada.