Business fluctuations and cycles
-
-
January 13, 2015
Drilling Down - Understanding Oil Prices and Their Economic Impact
Deputy Governor Timothy Lane discusses the causes of the recent drop in oil prices and its effects on the global and Canadian economies. -
November 13, 2014
Should Forward Guidance Be Backward-Looking?
When constrained by the zero lower bound, some central banks have communicated a threshold that must be met before short-term interest rates would be permitted to rise. Simulation results for Canada show that forward guidance that is conditional on achieving a price-level threshold can theoretically raise demand and inflation expectations by significantly more than unemployment thresholds. This superior performance is attributable to the fact that the price-level threshold depends on past inflation outcomes. In practice, however, history-dependent thresholds such as this might be more challenging for central banks to communicate. -
November 13, 2014
Firm Strategy, Competitiveness and Productivity: The Case for Canada
At a time when the Bank is expecting a rotation of demand toward exports and investment, and transformative global trends are placing increasing emphasis on innovation, technology and organizational learning, an understanding of the competitiveness strategies of Canadian firms and the factors affecting them has become particularly relevant. This article summarizes findings from a Bank of Canada survey of 151 firms designed to extract signals on elements of firm strategy and organizational capital in order to help inform the macroeconomic outlook. -
Credit Market Frictions and Sudden Stops
Financial crises in emerging economies in the 1980s and 1990s often entailed abrupt declines in foreign capital inflows, improvements in trade balance, and large declines in output and total factor productivity (TFP). -
The Propagation of Industrial Business Cycles
This paper examines the business cycle linkages that propagate industry-specific business cycle shocks throughout the economy in a way that (sometimes) generates aggregated cycles. The transmission of sectoral business cycles is modelled through a multivariate Markov-switching model, which is estimated by Gibbs sampling. -
Labour Share Fluctuations in Emerging Markets: The Role of the Cost of Borrowing
This paper contributes to the literature by documenting labour income share fluctuations in emerging-market economies and proposing an explanation for them. Time-series data indicate that emerging markets differ from developed markets in terms of changes in the labour share over the business cycle. -
On the Importance of Sales for Aggregate Price Flexibility
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. -
Real-Time Nowcasting of Nominal GDP Under Structural Breaks
This paper provides a framework for the early assessment of current U.S. nominal GDP growth, which has been considered a potential new monetary policy target. The nowcasts are computed using the exact amount of information that policy-makers have available at the time predictions are made. However, real-time information arrives at different frequencies and asynchronously, which poses challenges of mixed frequencies, missing data and ragged edges. -
A New Approach to Infer Changes in the Synchronization of Business Cycle Phases
This paper proposes a Markov-switching framework to endogenously identify the following: (1) regimes where economies synchronously enter recessionary and expansionary phases; and (2) regimes where economies are unsynchronized, essentially following independent business cycles.