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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.

This paper examines whether the hypothesis of economic convergence holds for the Canadian provinces. Using data on real gross domestic product per capita and on factor productivity from 1966 to 1992, the paper shows, using two different methods, that the convergence hypothesis cannot be rejected. This evidence supports the findings of other authors who have studied convergence among Canadian provinces.

While a number of central banks publish their own business conditions indicators that rely on non-random sampling, knowledge about their statistical accuracy has been limited.

The short-run Phillips curve describes a positive short-run relationship between the level of economic activity and inflation. When the level of demand in the economy as a whole runs ahead of the level of output that the economy can supply in the short run, price pressures increase and inflation rises. This article reviews the origins of the short-run Phillips curve with particular emphasis on the long-standing idea that the shape of this curve may be non-linear, with inflation becoming more sensitive to changes in output when the cycle of economic activity is high than when it is low. This type of non-linearity in the short-run Phillips curve, which is typically motivated by the effects of capacity constraints that limit the ability of the economy to expand in the short run, has recently attracted renewed attention. The article surveys recent research that finds some evidence of this type of non-linearity in the Phillips curve in Canada and considers the potential implications for monetary policy.

Central banks continuously strive to improve how they communicate to financial markets and the public in order to increase transparency. For this reason, many central banks have begun to include guidance on the policy rate in the form of forward-looking statements in their communications. This article examines the debate over the usefulness of providing such statements from both theoretical and empirical standpoints. The evidence presented here suggests that the use of forward-looking statements in Bank of Canada communications has made the Bank more predictable, but not necessarily more transparent.

Central bankers argue that programmable digital currencies may compromise the uniformity of money. We develop a stylized model to examine this argument and the trade-offs involved in circulating programmable money.

This paper proposes a novel regression-based approach to the estimation of Gaussian dynamic term structure models that avoids numerical optimization.

I develop a population-based Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithm known as parallel tempering to estimate dynamic stochastic general equilibrium models. Parallel tempering approximates the posterior distribution of interest using a family of Markov chains with tempered posteriors.