Inventories in ToTEM

ToTEM – the Bank of Canada’s principal projection and policy-analysis model for the Canadian economy – is extended to include inventories. In the model, firms accumulate inventories of finished goods for their role in facilitating the demand for goods. The model is successful in matching procyclical and volatile inventory investment behaviour. The authors show that the convex cost of stock adjustment is key to the model’s ability to match the inventory data quantitatively.