Search

The empirical relationship between the average growth rate and the volatility of growth rates, both over time and across countries, has important policy implications, which depend critically on the sign of the relationship.

The emergence of digital currencies such as Bitcoin and the underlying blockchain and distribution ledger technology have attracted significant attention. These developments have raised the possibility of considerable impacts on the financial system and perhaps the wider economy.

It is a mistake to debate the merits of alternative exchange rate regimes for Canada independently of other features of the monetary order. A coherent order requires a well-defined goal for monetary policy, one that the authorities are capable of achieving, and that anchors private sector expectations. For it to be liberal, the relevant authorities […]

We introduce a new approach for the estimation of high-dimensional factor models with regime-switching factor loadings by extending the linear three-pass regression filter to settings where parameters can vary according to Markov processes.

It has been well documented that the education premium measured by the wage difference between university and high school graduates has remained constant over the past two decades in Canada. Despite this stable pattern at the aggregate level, skill-biased technology could have important implications for the inter-industry wage structure.

The 2002 Bank of Canada Conference focused on price adjustment, a critically important issue for monetary policy. Given the acceptance throughout the 1990s and 2000s of the existence of price stickiness in goods or labour markets, or both, and of the important role that monetary policy can play in an economy, the time was right for a conference that would focus on current developments in this area of research, particularly within a Canadian context. Conference papers covering both theoretical and empirical studies explored such themes as sources of the persistence of inflation, forward-looking models of inflation, models of inflation in open economies, the macroeconomic effects of technology shocks, and models of the interaction between wages, prices, and real economic outcomes.

Solving macroeconomic models is difficult. One challenge is the occasionally binding constraint of the zero lower bound on nominal interest rates. This paper reviews various ways to solve models that include this feature.

Estimation of the quantile model, especially with a large data set, can be computationally burdensome. This paper proposes using the Gaussian approximation, also known as quantile coupling, to estimate a quantile model.

The objective of this paper is to propose an early warning system that can predict the likelihood of the occurrence of financial stress events within a given period of time. To achieve this goal, the signal extraction approach proposed by Kaminsky, Lizondo and Reinhart (1998) is used to monitor the evolution of a number of economic indicators that tend to exhibit an unusual behaviour in the periods preceding a financial stress event.

We demonstrate the usefulness of payment systems data and machine learning models for macroeconomic predictions and provide a set of econometric tools to overcome associated challenges.