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How do changes to personal and corporate income tax rates in the United States affect its trading partners? Spillover effects from cuts in the two taxes differ. They are generally small and negative for corporate taxes, but sizable and positive for personal income taxes.

We conduct surveys to study how consumer spending responds to higher inflation expectations. Most respondents spend the same, sticking to fixed budget plans or not considering inflation for spending decisions. About 20% decrease spending because they feel poorer and cut spending to invest in inflation-proof assets. Very few increase spending.

The Bank of Canada maintains regular contact with financial institutions as part of the information-gathering process that feeds into the larger set of information used to arrive at its monetary policy decision. Since 1999, the Bank has been conducting a quarterly survey of the business-lending practices of major Canadian financial institutions. Analysis of the information collected shows that it is correlated with future growth in both credit and business investment. This article focuses on how the survey is conducted and describes the construction of the summary statistics, highlighting the key statistical relationships in the historical survey data.

Should a CBDC be more like cash or bank deposits? An interest-bearing, cash-like CBDC not only makes payments more efficient but also increases total demand. This has positive effects on other transactions, inducing more deposit taking and lending and, thus, bank intermediation.

In an economy where production takes place in multiple stages and is subject to financial frictions, how firms finance intermediate inputs matters for aggregate outcomes. This paper focuses on trade credit—the lending and borrowing of input goods between firms—and quantifies its aggregate impacts during the Great Recession.

This paper proposes a method for estimating the joint distribution of two or more variables when only their marginal distributions and the distribution of their aggregates are observed. Nonparametric identification is achieved by modelling dependence using a latent common-factor structure.

We estimate a model of households in Norway with bequest motives, health-dependent utility, and uncertain longevity and health. Our estimates imply strong bequest motives for households both with and without offspring. We interpret this as suggestive evidence that utility from residual wealth represents forces beyond an altruistic bequest motive.

This paper contributes to the debate on the magnitude of exchange rate elasticities by providing a set of price and quantity elasticities for 51 advanced and emerging-market economies. Specifically, for each of these countries we report the elasticity of trade prices and trade quantities on both the export and on the import sides, as well as the reaction of the trade balance.

Many reports and analyses interpret the release of new economic data based on the headline surprise—for instance, total inflation, real GDP growth and the unemployment rate. However, we find that headline news alone cannot adequately explain the responses of market prices to new information. Rather, market prices react more strongly, on average, to non-headline news such as the composition of GDP growth, quality of jobs created and revisions to past data. Thus, tracking the impact of non-headline information released on the news day is crucial in analyzing how markets interpret and react to new economic data.