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Keynes wrote prophetically of the economic consequences of the Treaty of Versailles. Could the same be said of current financial reforms? Are policy-makers taking for granted the essential role performed by finance in a vain pursuit of its risk-proofing?

The combination of rising current account surpluses in Asia and a growing current account deficit in the United States has raised concerns that the resulting imbalances pose a threat to the world economy, especially if they are reversed in a disorderly manner. Some experts believe that normal market forces will resolve these imbalances over time; others argue that policy-makers should facilitate the adjustment with policies that curb domestic demand in deficit countries and stimulate it in surplus countries. Little and Lafrance provide a guide to the major issues and controversies involved in the debate.

Using Canadian matched employer-employee data, we show that working hours of different workers are gross complements in production rather than perfect substitutes, as is typically assumed by macroeconomic models of production.

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

This paper examines the effects of time-varying volatility on welfare. I construct a tractable endogenous growth model with recursive preferences, stochastic volatility, and capital adjustment costs.

Coholder households simultaneously carry high-cost credit card debt and low-yield cash. We study the implications of this behavior for fiscal and monetary policy, finding that coholder households have smaller consumption responses in the short run but larger responses in the long run.

We propose a macroeconomic model with a nonlinear Phillips curve that has a flat slope when inflationary pressures are subdued and steepens when inflationary pressures are elevated. Our model can generate more sizable inflation surges due to cost-push and demand shocks than a standard linearized model when inflation is high.

Commodity prices are once again making headlines. Some commodity prices, such as those for copper and cattle, have reached record highs; others are rising quickly and approaching previous peaks.

In recent years, the Bank has put renewed emphasis on analyzing monetary variables and on developing models that incorporate money as an active part of the transmission mechanism. In this article, Dinah Maclean describes how the monetary aggregates are used in the formulation of monetary policy analysis at the Bank, outlining the key tools and models used. The most important money-based model currently in use is the M1-VECM. In this model, deviations in the money supply from the long-term demand for money cause changes in inflation. The author briefly describes the "active-money" paradigm underlying this model and explains the key equations within it. Other simpler empirical models are also outlined, including single-equation indicator models for output based on the narrow aggregates, a neural network, and a model based on the broader aggregate M2++. A detailed technical annex provides details on model equations and coefficient values.

Many central banks around the world have embraced inflation targeting as a monetary policy framework. Interest is growing, however, in price-level targeting as an alternative. The choice of frameworks has important consequences for financial contracts, most of which are not fully indexed to the price level. Changes in the price level therefore lead to changes in the real value of contracts.