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The official Chinese labour market indicators have been seen as problematic, given their small cyclical movement and their only-partial capture of the labour force. In our paper, we build a monthly Chinese labour market conditions index (LMCI) using text analytics applied to mainland Chinese-language newspapers over the period from 2003 to 2017.

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 authors examine the investment behaviour of a sample of small, credit-constrained firms in Sri Lanka. Using a unique panel-data set, they analyze and compare the activities of two groups of small firms distinguished by their different access to financing; one group consists of firms with heavily subsidized loans from the World Bank, and the other consists of firms without such subsidies.

Conventional wisdom holds that institutional changes and trade liberalization are two main sources of growth in per capita income around the world.

This article draws on theory and empirical evidence to examine a number of factors behind movements in Canadian house prices. It begins with an overview of the movements in house prices in Canada, using regional data to highlight factors that influence prices over the long run. It then turns to the central theme, that there are medium-run movements in prices not accounted for by long-run factors. Drawing on recent Bank of Canada research, the article discusses several factors behind these medium-run movements, including interest rates, expected price appreciation and market liquidity. The article concludes by identifying areas for future research that would further our understanding of fluctuations in house prices.

We study a model with repeated moral hazard where financial contracts are not fully indexed to inflation because nominal prices are observed with delay as in Jovanovic & Ueda (1997).

This paper studies the role that market structure plays in affecting the diffusion of electronic banking. Electronic banking (and electronic commerce more generally) reduces the cost of performing many types of transactions for firms.

This article reviews arguments in the literature for and against price-level targeting, focusing on its costs and benefits compared with inflation targeting. Benefits of price-level targeting include the effect on forward-looking inflation expectations; the ability to substitute for commitment by a central bank to its future policies; lessening forecast errors; better economic performance in response to real shocks because of lower wage indexation; and a reduction in the problem of the zero lower bound on nominal interest rates.

The impact of oil price shocks on the U.S. economy is a topic of considerable debate. In this paper, we examine the response of U.S. consumers to the 2014–2015 negative oil price shock using representative survey data from the Consumer Expenditure Survey.

Using a rich data set on government spending forecasts in Japan, we provide new evidence on the effects of unexpected changes in government spending when the nominal interest rate is near the zero lower bound (ZLB).