Staff working papers

Implications for signal extraction from specifying unobserved components (UC) models with correlated or orthogonal innovations have been well investigated. In contrast, the forecasting implications of specifying UC models with different state correlation structures are less well understood.

The impact of oil price shocks on the U.S. economy is a topic of considerable debate. In this paper, we examine the response of U.S. consumers to the 2014–2015 negative oil price shock using representative survey data from the Consumer Expenditure Survey.

The official Chinese labour market indicators have been seen as problematic, given their small cyclical movement and their only-partial capture of the labour force. In our paper, we build a monthly Chinese labour market conditions index (LMCI) using text analytics applied to mainland Chinese-language newspapers over the period from 2003 to 2017.

This paper estimates an open-economy dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model with Bayesian techniques to analyse the macroeconomic effects of the European Central Bank’s (ECB’s) quantitative easing (QE) programme. Using data on government debt stocks and yields across maturities, we identify the parameter governing portfolio adjustment in the private sector.

We use a new real-time database for Canada to study various output gap measures. This includes recently developed measures based on models incorporating many variables as inputs (and therefore requiring real-time data for many variables).

Implicit government guarantees of banking-sector liabilities reduce market discipline by private sector stakeholders and temper the risk sensitivity of funding costs. This potentially increases the likelihood of bailouts from taxpayers, especially in the absence of effective resolution frameworks.

Using data on Canadian bond futures, we examine how high-frequency traders (HFTs) interact with institutions building large positions. In contrast to recent findings, we find HFTs in the data act as small-sized liquidity suppliers, and we reject the hypothesis that they engage in back running, a predatory trading strategy.

A model of over-the-counter markets is proposed. Some asset buyers are informed in that they can identify high quality assets. Heterogeneous sellers with private information choose what type of buyers they want to trade with.

The consumption boom-bust cycle in the 2000s coincided with large fluctuations in the volume of home equity borrowing. Contrary to conventional wisdom, I show that homeowners largely borrowed for residential investment and not consumption.

We identify the drivers of unsecured and collateralized loan volumes, rates and haircuts in Canada using the Bayesian model averaging approach to deal with model uncertainty. Our results suggest that the key friction driving behaviour in this market is the collateral reallocation cost faced by borrowers.