Business fluctuations and cycles

• Extracting Information from the Business Outlook Survey Using Statistical Approaches

  Staff Discussion Paper 2012-8 Lise Pichette

  Since the autumn of 1997, the regional offices of the Bank of Canada have conducted quarterly consultations with businesses across Canada. These consultations, summarized in the Business Outlook Survey (BOS), are structured around a survey questionnaire that covers topics of importance to the Bank, notably business activity, pressures on production capacity, prices and inflation, and credit conditions.

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff discussion papers Topic(s): Business fluctuations and cycles, Regional economic developments JEL Code(s): C, C4, C43, C8, C82, E, E3, E37

• The Effects of Oil Price Uncertainty on the Macroeconomy

  Staff Working Paper 2012-40 Soojin Jo

  This paper investigates the effect of oil price uncertainty on real economic activity using a quarterly VAR with stochastic volatility in mean. Stochastic volatility allows oil price uncertainty to vary separately from changes in the level of oil prices, and thus the impact of oil price uncertainty can be examined in a more flexible yet tractable way.

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Topic(s): Business fluctuations and cycles, Econometric and statistical methods JEL Code(s): C, C3, C32, E, E3, E32, Q, Q4, Q43

• The Role of Credit in International Business Cycles

  Staff Working Paper 2012-36 TengTeng Xu

  This paper examines the role of bank credit in modeling and forecasting business cycle fluctuations, and investigates the international transmission of US credit shocks, using a global vector autoregressive (GVAR) framework and associated country-specific error correction models.

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Topic(s): Business fluctuations and cycles, Credit and credit aggregates, Econometric and statistical methods, International financial markets JEL Code(s): C, C3, C32, E, E3, E32, E4, E44, G, G2, G21

• Financial Conditions and the Money-Output Relationship in Canada

  Staff Working Paper 2012-33 Maral Kichian

  We propose a drifting-coefficient model to empirically study the effect of money on output growth in Canada and to examine the role of prevailing financial conditions for that relationship. We show that such a time-varying approach can be a useful way of modelling the impact of money on growth, and can partly reconcile the lack of concensus in the literature on the question of whether money affects growth.

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Topic(s): Business fluctuations and cycles, Credit and credit aggregates, Monetary aggregates JEL Code(s): E, E4, E44, E5, E51

• China’s Emergence in the World Economy and Business Cycles in Latin America

  Staff Working Paper 2012-32 Ambrogio Cesa-Bianchi, M. Hashem Pesaran, Alessandro Rebucci, TengTeng Xu

  The international business cycle is very important for Latin America’s economic performance as the recent global crisis vividly illustrated. This paper investigates how changes in trade linkages between China, Latin America, and the rest of the world have altered the transmission mechanism of international business cycles to Latin America.

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Topic(s): Business fluctuations and cycles, Econometric and statistical methods, International topics, Recent economic and financial developments, Regional economic developments JEL Code(s): C, C3, C32, E, E3, E32, F, F4, F44, O, O5, O54

• International Business Cycles and Financial Frictions

  Staff Working Paper 2012-19 Wen Yao

  This paper builds a two-country DSGE model to study the quantitative impact of financial frictions on business cycle co-movements when investors have foreign asset exposure. The investor in each country holds capital in both countries and faces a leverage constraint on her debt.

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Topic(s): Business fluctuations and cycles, International financial markets, International topics JEL Code(s): E, E3, E30, F, F4, F42, F44

• Fooled by Search: Housing Prices, Turnover and Bubbles

  Staff Working Paper 2012-3 Brian Peterson

  his paper develops and estimates a model to explain the behaviour of house prices in the United States. The main finding is that over 70% of the increase in house prices relative to trend during the increase of house prices in the United States from 1995 to 2006 can be explained by a pricing mechanism where market participants are ‘Fooled by Search.’

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Topic(s): Asset pricing, Business fluctuations and cycles JEL Code(s): E, E3, R, R2, R21