Business fluctuations and cycles
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High-Frequency Real Economic Activity Indicator for Canada
I construct a weekly measure of real economic activity in Canada. Based on the work of Aruoba et al. (2009), the indicator is extracted as an unobserved component underlying the co-movement of four monthly observed real macroeconomic variables - employment, manufacturing sales, retail sales and GDP. -
Unemployment Fluctuations in a Small Open-Economy Model with Segmented Labour Markets: The Case of Canada
The recent financial crisis and subsequent recession have spurred great interest in the sources of unemployment fluctuations. Previous studies predominantly assume a single economy-wide labour market, and therefore abstract from differences across sectorspecific labour markets in the economy. -
ToTEM II: An Updated Version of the Bank of Canada’s Quarterly Projection Model
This report provides a detailed technical description of an updated version of the Terms-of-Trade Economic Model (ToTEM II), which replaced ToTEM (Murchison and Rennison 2006) in June 2011 as the Bank of Canada’s quarterly projection model for Canada. -
The Common Component of CPI: An Alternative Measure of Underlying Inflation for Canada
In this paper, the authors propose a measure of underlying inflation for Canada obtained from estimating a monthly factor model on individual components of the CPI. This measure, labelled the common component of CPI, has intuitive appeal and a number of interesting features. -
Endogenous Trade Participation with Incomplete Exchange Rate Pass-Through
This paper investigates the implications of endogenous trade participation for international business cycles, trade flow dynamics and exchange rate pass-through when price adjustments are staggered across firms. -
August 15, 2013
Monitoring Short-Term Economic Developments in Foreign Economies
The Bank of Canada uses several short-term forecasting models for the monitoring of key foreign economies - the United States, the euro area, Japan and China. The design of the forecasting models used for each region is influenced by the level of detail required, as well as the timeliness and volatility of data. Forecasts from different models are typically combined to mitigate model uncertainty, and judgment is applied to the model forecasts to incorporate information that is not directly reflected in the most recent indicators. -
Business Cycle Effects of Credit Shocks in a DSGE Model with Firm Defaults
This paper proposes a theoretical framework to analyze the relationship between credit shocks, firm defaults and volatility, and to study the impact of credit shocks on business cycle dynamics. -
February 21, 2013
The U.S. Recovery from the Great Recession: A Story of Debt and Deleveraging
The U.S. recovery from the Great Recession has been slow relative to other postwar-era recoveries in the United States. Encouraged by loose lending standards in the pre-crisis period, U.S. households took on unsustainable amounts of debt, making them vulnerable to adverse shocks. Subsequently, a considerable drop in asset prices forced households to repair their balance sheets. While there has been progress in household deleveraging, the government sector now needs to delever, which will restrain growth over the next few years.