Staff working papers

Recent events, such as the East Asian, Mexican, Scandinavian, and Argentinian crises, have sparked considerable interest in exploring how shocks experienced by one country can spread vis-à-vis real and nominal links to other countries' banking systems. Given the large costs associated with banking-system failures, both economists and policy-makers are interested in predicting the onset of banking crises and assessing the likelihood of contagion during crisis events.

The author presents empirical evidence that he has obtained from an analysis of the response of different economic variables, including the real wage rate, to a technology shock.

Payments systems operate virtually unnoticed in our daily lives and yet are crucial to a wellfunctioning economy and financial system.

Using interest rate yield spreads to explain changes in inflation, we investigate whether such relationships can be modelled using two-regime threshold models.

Within a unified framework, the author conducts an empirical investigation of dynamic interrelationships among inflation, inflation uncertainty, relative price dispersion, and output growth.

The effects of global energy-price shocks on retail energy prices in Canada are examined. More specifically, the author looks at the response of the consumer price indexes for gasoline, heating oil, natural gas, and electricity in Canada to movements in world crude oil prices.

One of the central lessons learned from the Great Depression was that adjusting government spending each year to balance the budget increases the volatility of output.

The authors describe the principal results obtained from a new method applied to the estimation of potential U.S. GDP.

This paper reviews both the theoretical and empirical literature on the impact of common currencies on financial markets and evaluates the first three years of experience with Economic and Monetary Union (EMU).

This paper examines the daily hedging and risk-management practices of financial intermediaries in the Canadian foreign exchange (FX) market.