This paper documents the structure and properties of the Canadian Policy Analysis Model (CPAM). CPAM is designed to provide a reasonably complete representation of the Canadian macro economy.
Topic: Economic modelsThe Bank of Canada's new Quarterly Projection Model, QPM, combines the short-term dynamic properties necessary to support regular economic projections with the consistent behavioural structure necessary for policy analysis.
Topic: Economic modelsIn this paper, the authors report estimates of two- and three-state Markov switching models applied to inflation, measured using consumer price indexes, in the G-7 countries. They report tests that show that two-state models are preferred to simple one-state representations of the data, and argue that three-state representations are more satisfactory than two-state representations for [...]
Topic: Inflation and pricesThis paper examines the macroeconomic implications of rising government debt in Canada and the short-run costs and long-run benefits of stemming the rise. The discussion begins with an evaluation of the long-run consequences of increasing government indebtedness, first based on the simple arithmetic of the government's long-run budget constraint, and then based on simulations of [...]
Topic: Fiscal PolicyIn this report, we describe methods for solving economic models when expectations are presumed to have at least some element of consistency with the predictions of the model itself. We present analytical results that establish the convergence properties of alternative solution procedures for linear models with unique solutions. Only one method is guaranteed to converge, [...]
Topic: Economic modelsThis article provides an overview of the Bank of Canada's new economic model, the Quarterly Projection Model (QPM), which has been under development at the Bank since 1989.
The model has two roles. It is used to make economic projections, which are conducted quarterly and form an important basis for discussions of monetary policy between staff and senior management. QPM is also a research tool: it was developed to analyse important changes to the economy or macroeconomic policies which require a deeper understanding of long-term economic forces.
The model pays particular attention to factors shaping long-term equilibrium, such as stocks of wealth, capital, government debt and net foreign assets. Various sources of dynamics, including the adjustment of forward-looking expectations, operate to determine the transition path to equilibrium and the consistency of expectations.
The article discusses the history of QPM and earlier economic models at the Bank, and provides a simple overview of how the model works.
Topic: Economic modelsThis report is the first documenting the Bank of Canada's new model of the Canadian economy, the Quarterly Projection Model (QPM). QPM is used at the Bank of Canada for both economic projections and policy analysis. Here the authors focus on the model's long-run properties, describing SSQPM, a model of the steady state of QPM [...]
Topic: Economic modelsThis report shows that extreme conditions and volatility in markets are much more likely to result from systematic policy errors in gauging and responding to inflationary pressures in an economy than from unfortunate random shocks. We describe a simple model that incorporates the key features of the policy control process. We use two versions of [...]
Topic: Economic models; Inflation and prices; Uncertainty and monetary policyAn important question that faces macroeconomic policy makers is whether the economy can absorb increases in aggregate demand without generating inflationary pressures. Many economists have found it useful to approach this issue by asking whether the economy is operating at a rate of unemployment consistent with inflation neither accelerating nor decelerating, all else being equal. [...]
Topic: Labour marketsThis volume contains a detailed description of the structure and sectoral properties of the Bank of Canada's Small Annual Model, SAM. The SAM model, constructed in the Research Department of the Bank, is designed for medium- to long-term simulation. It is small by econometric model standards; the version described in this report has 25 stochastic [...]
Topic: Interest rates