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Several economists, including Cover (1992), Ammer and Brunner (1995), Macklem, Paquet, and Phaneuf (1996), have worked over the past few years to determine whether monetary policy shocks have asymmetric effects on output. These authors have generally found that negative monetary shocks tend to reduce output growth significantly, and that positive shocks generally have a weaker […]

This paper studies the impact of market timing on Canadian firms' capital structure and makes a comparison with U.S. firms.

This note presents the updated estimates of potential output growth for the global economy through 2021. Global potential output is expected to grow by 3.3 per cent per year over the projection horizon.

This paper empirically investigates the possibility that the effects of shocks to output depend on the level of inflation. The analysis extends Elwood's (1998) framework by incorporating in the model an inflation-threshold process that can potentially influence the stochastic properties of output.

The U.S. Federal Reserve responded to the great recession by reducing policy rates to the effective lower bound. In order to provide further monetary stimulus, they subsequently conducted large-scale asset purchases, quadrupling their balance sheet in the process.

We model how securities dealers respond to regulations on leverage, position and liquidity such as those imposed by the Basel III framework. We show that while asset prices exhibit greater price impact, bid-ask spreads do not change and trading volumes may even increase.

Traditional structural models cannot distinguish whether changes in activity are a function of altered expectations today or lagged responses to past plans. Polynomial-adjustment-cost (PAC) models remove this ambiguity by explicitly separating observed dynamic behaviour into movements that have been induced by changes in expectations, and responses to expectations, that have been delayed because of adjustment costs.

A number of central banks publish their own business conditions survey based on non-random sampling methods. The results of these surveys influence monetary policy decisions and thus affect expectations in financial markets. To date, however, no one has computed the statistical accuracy of these surveys because their respective non-random sampling method renders this assessment non-trivial.

How do a country’s exports change when its currency depreciates? Does it matter which forces drive the exchange rate deprecation in the first place? We find that this relationship varies greatly depending on what drives exchange rate movements, and we conclude that the direct relationship between the exchange rate and exports is weak for Canada.

This study introduces a new method for identifying the output gap, based on the estimation of multivariate autoregression (VAR) models. This approach, which involves using restrictions to identify structural shocks that have only a transitory effect on output but that affect the trend inflation rate, is compared with the decomposition method proposed by Blanchard and […]