Business fluctuations and cycles
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October 22, 2006
ToTEM: The Bank of Canada's New Projection and Policy-Analysis Model
The Terms-of-Trade Economic Model, or ToTEM, replaced the Quarterly Projection Model (QPM) in December 2005 as the Bank's principal projection and policy-analysis model for the Canadian economy. Benefiting from advances in economic modelling and computer power, ToTEM builds on the strengths of QPM, allowing for optimizing behaviour on the part of firms and households, both in and out of steady state, in a multi-product environment. The authors explain the motivation behind the development of ToTEM, provide an overview of the model and its calibration, and present several simulations to illustrate its key properties, concluding with some indications of how the model is expected to evolve going forward. -
The Macroeconomic Effects of Non-Zero Trend Inflation
The authors study the macroeconomic effects of non-zero trend inflation in a simple dynamic stochastic general-equilibrium model with sticky prices. -
Linear and Threshold Forecasts of Output and Inflation with Stock and Housing Prices
The authors examine whether simple measures of Canadian equity and housing price misalignments contain leading information about output growth and inflation. -
Are Average Growth Rate and Volatility Related?
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. -
Launching the NEUQ: The New European Union Quarterly Model, A Small Model of the Euro Area and U.K. Economies
The authors develop a projection model of the euro area and the United Kingdom. The model consists of two country blocks, endogenous to each other via the foreign demand channel. -
Monetary Policy in an Estimated DSGE Model with a Financial Accelerator
The authors estimate a sticky-price dynamic stochastic general-equilibrium model with a financial accelerator, à la Bernanke, Gertler, and Gilchrist (1999), to assess the importance of financial frictions in the amplification and propagation of the effects of transitory shocks. -
Forecasting Canadian Time Series with the New Keynesian Model
The authors document the out-of-sample forecasting accuracy of the New Keynesian model for Canada. -
MUSE: The Bank of Canada's New Projection Model of the U.S. Economy
The analysis and forecasting of developments in the U.S. economy have always played a critical role in the formulation of Canadian economic and financial policy. Thus, the Bank places considerable importance on generating internal forecasts of U.S. economic activity as an input to the Canadian projection. -
Does Financial Structure Matter for the Information Content of Financial Indicators?
Of particular concern to monetary policy-makers is the considerable unreliability of financial variables for predicting GDP growth and inflation.