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We revisit an old question: how do financial constraints affect the transmission of monetary policy to the real economy? To answer this question, we propose a simple empirical strategy that combines firm-level employment and balance sheet data, identified monetary policy shocks and survey data on financing activities.

This paper explores the arguments for and against a common currency for Canada and the United States and attempts to determine whether such an arrangement would offer any significant advantages for Canada compared with the present flexible exchange rate system. The paper first reviews the theoretical arguments advanced in the economics literature in support of fixed and flexible currency arrangements. A discussion of Canada's past experience with the two exchange rate systems follows, after which there is a survey of the empirical evidence published on Canada's current and prospective suitability for some form of fixed currency arrangement with the United States. The final section of the paper examines critically a number of concerns raised about the behaviour of the current flexible exchange rate system.

This paper shows that if the Bank of Canada is optimally adjusting its monetary policy instrument in response to inflation indicators to target 2 per cent inflation at a two-year horizon, then deviations of inflation from 2 per cent represent the Bank's forecast errors, and should be uncorrelated with its information set, which includes two-year lagged values of the instrument and the indicators. Positive or negative correlations are evidence of systematic errors in monetary policy.

This paper proposes a novel regression-based approach to the estimation of Gaussian dynamic term structure models that avoids numerical optimization.

The empirical relationship between the average growth rate and the volatility of growth rates, both over time and across countries, has important policy implications, which depend critically on the sign of the relationship.

We construct and estimate a structural two-stage model of equilibrium in a market for payments in order to quantify the network externalities and identify the main determinants of consumer and merchant decisions.

In recent years, significant efforts have been made to attract more women into academia and to support their careers, with the goal of increasing their representation.

We examine systemic risks within the Canadian banking sector, decomposing them into three contribution channels: contagion, common exposures, and idiosyncratic risk. Through a structural model, we dissect how interbank relationships and market conditions contribute to systemic risk, providing new insights for financial stability.

We estimate a New Keynesian general-equilibrium open economy model to examine how changes in oil prices affect the macroeconomy. Our model allows oil price changes to be transmitted through temporary demand and supply channels (affecting the output gap), as well as through persistent supply side effects (affecting trend growth).

In this paper we study the impact of immigration to the United States on the vote for the Republican Party by analyzing county-level data on election outcomes between 1990 and 2010. Our main contribution is to separate the effect of high-skilled and low-skilled immigrants, by exploiting the different geography and timing of the inflows of these two groups of immigrants.