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We study the importance of supply constraints in explaining the heterogeneity in house price cycles across geographies in the United States.

We study the transmission and third-country effects of international sanctions. A sanctioned country’s losses are mitigated, and the sanctioning country’s losses amplified, if a third country does not join the sanctions, but the third country benefits from not joining.

In this paper we look at the relative information content of cash and futures prices for Canadian Government bonds. We follow the information-share approaches introduced by Hasbrouck (1995) and Harris et al (1995), applying the techniques in Gonzalo-Granger (1995), to evaluate the relative contributions of trading in the cash and futures markets to the price discovery process.

Annual research grants for a term of up to two years.

In November 2006, the Bank of Canada announced its intention to lead a concerted research program over the next few years on the type of monetary policy framework that would best contribute to the economic well-being of Canadians in the decades ahead. The research will focus on two broad questions: whether economic welfare might be […]

This paper considers an economy where central-bank-issued fiat money competes with privately issued e-money. We study a policy-setting game between the central bank and the e-money issuer and find (1) the optimal monetary policy of the central bank depends on the policy of the private issuer and may deviate from the Friedman rule; (2) multiple equilibria may exist; (3) when the economy approaches a cashless state, the central bank’s optimal policy improves the market power of the e-money issuer and can lead to a discrete decrease in welfare and a discrete increase in inflation; and (4) first best cannot be achieved.

This paper studies the efficiency of financial intermediation through securitization in a model with heterogeneous investment projects and asymmetric information about the quality of securitized assets. I show that when retaining part of the risk, the issuer of securitized assets may credibly signal its quality.

This paper constructs a theory of the coexistence of fixed-term and permanent employment contracts in an environment with ex-ante identical workers and employers. Workers under fixed-term contracts can be dismissed at no cost while permanent employees enjoy labor protection.

This note studies a form of a utility function of consumption with habit and leisure that (a) is compatible with long-run balanced growth, (b) hits a steady-state observed target for hours worked and (c) is consistent with micro-econometric evidence for the inter-temporal elasticity of substitution and the Frisch elasticity of labor supply.

We document a strong asymmetry in the evolution of federal funds rate expectations and map this observed asymmetry into measures of monetary policy uncertainty. We show that periods of monetary policy tightening and easing are distinctly related to downside (policy rate is higher than expected) and upside (policy rate is lower than expected) uncertainty.