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McCallum (1994a) proposes a monetary rule where policymakers have some tendency to resist rapid changes in exchange rates to explain the forward premium puzzle.

Macroeconomists have traditionally ignored the behavior of temporary price markdowns (“sales”) by retailers. Although sales are common in the micro price data, they are assumed to be unrelated to macroeconomic phenomena and generally filtered out.

This report shows that extreme conditions and volatility in markets are much more likely to result from systematic policy errors in gauging and responding to inflationary pressures in an economy than from unfortunate random shocks. We describe a simple model that incorporates the key features of the policy control process. We use two versions of […]

Inflation can affect both the dispersion of commodity-specific price levels across locations (relative price variability, RPV) and the dispersion of inflation rates (relative inflation variability, RIV). Some menu-cost models and models of consumer search suggest that the RIV-inflation relationship could differ from the RPV-inflation relationship.

This paper studies an economy where agents can spend resources on consuming a private good and on funding a public good. There is asymmetric information regarding agents’ relative preference for private versus public good consumption.

We examine the quantitative effect of search frictions in product markets on asset price volatility. We combine several features from Shi (1997) and Lagos and Wright (2002) in a model without money. Households prefer special goods and general goods.

I study rollover risk in the wholesale funding market when intermediaries can hold liquidity ex ante and are subject to fire sales ex post.

Changes in the financial industry result in new data that are inconsistent with the former presentation, and therefore adjustments are required to "adjust" or smooth out these breaks to establish continuity.

Recent evidence indicates that the intensity of economic exchange within and across borders is significantly different: linkages are much tighter within, than among, nation-states. These findings, however, do not necessarily imply that borders and separate national currencies represent significant barriers to trade that should be removed, since the evidence is also consistent with the alternative hypothesis, that domestic exchange is more efficient because domestic producers are better able to satisfy the requirements of local consumers, owing to common tastes and institutions and the existence of local information and social networks. Focusing primarily on trade linkages within and between Canada and the United States, the authors review the evidence on the extent to which national borders lessen the intensity of international economic linkages, primarily trade in goods and services, and the effects on domestic welfare. They also examine the evidence on the impact of common currencies on trade and welfare. They determine that, since the empirical models employed to date in this research cannot distinguish between alternative explanations of the evidence, it is not yet possible to draw firm conclusions for policy-making.

While demographic change has been an ongoing process in Canada, labour market implications of an aging population will become more acute in coming years. This article discusses the anticipated slowing in the growth of trend labour input over the coming decades with the aging of the baby boomers, declining fertility rates, and the stabilization of the labour force attachment of women. As the pool of labour shrinks, employers and governments will be looking for ways to address barriers to continued labour force participation and firms will have a greater incentive to find ways of improving labour productivity.