Staff working papers

• The Usefulness of Consumer Confidence Indexes in the United States

  Staff Working Paper 2002-22 Brigitte Desroches, Marc-André Gosselin

  This paper assesses the usefulness of consumer confidence indexes in forecasting aggregate consumer spending in the United States.

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Topic(s): Domestic demand and components, Economic models, International topics JEL Code(s): D, D1, D12, E, E2, E21, E27

• Entrepreneurial Risk, Credit Constraints, and the Corporate Income Tax: A Quantitative Exploration

  Staff Working Paper 2002-21 Césaire Meh

  This paper describes the positive effect that corporate income tax has on capital formation in the presence of liquidity constraints and uninsurable risk.

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Topic(s): Economic models, Fiscal policy JEL Code(s): D, D3, D31, E, E6, E62, H, H2, H20, H23

• Evaluating the Quarterly Projection Model: A Preliminary Investigation

  Staff Working Paper 2002-20 Robert Amano, Kim McPhail, Hope Pioro, Andrew Rennison

  This paper summarizes the results of recent research evaluating the Bank of Canada's Quarterly Projection Model (QPM).

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Topic(s): Economic models JEL Code(s): C, C5, C52, E, E1, E17, E3, E30, E37

• Estimates of the Sticky-Information Phillips Curve for the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom

  Staff Working Paper 2002-19 Hashmat Khan, Zhenhua Zhu

  Mankiw and Reis (2001a) have proposed a "sticky-information"-based Phillips curve (SIPC) to address some of the concerns with the "sticky-price"-based new Keynesian Phillips curve.

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Topic(s): Economic models, Inflation and prices JEL Code(s): E, E3, E31

• Estimated DGE Models and Forecasting Accuracy: A Preliminary Investigation with Canadian Data

  Staff Working Paper 2002-18 Kevin Moran, Veronika Dolar

  This paper applies the hybrid dynamic general-equilibrium, vector autoregressive (DGE-VAR) model developed by Ireland (1999) to Canadian time series.

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Topic(s): Business fluctuations and cycles, Economic models JEL Code(s): E, E3, E32, E37

• Does Exchange Rate Policy Matter for Growth?

  Staff Working Paper 2002-17 Jeannine Bailliu, Robert Lafrance, Jean-François Perrault

  Previous studies on whether the nature of the exchange rate regime influences a country's medium-term growth performance have been based on a tripartite classification scheme that distinguishes between pegged, intermediate, and flexible exchange rate regimes.

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Topic(s): Exchange rate regimes, Exchange rates, Monetary policy framework JEL Code(s): F, F3, F31, F33, F4, F43, O, O4, O40

• A Market Microstructure Analysis of Foreign Exchange Intervention in Canada

  Staff Working Paper 2002-16 Chris D'Souza

  This paper clarifies the role and the impact of foreign exchange dealers in the relationship between foreign exchange intervention and nominal exchange rates using a unique dataset that disaggregates trades by dealer and by type of trade.

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Topic(s): Exchange rates, Financial institutions, Financial markets JEL Code(s): F, F3, F31, G, G1, G14, G2, G21

• Corporate Bond Spreads and the Business Cycle

  Staff Working Paper 2002-15 Zhiwei Zhang

  This paper examines the predictive power of credit spreads from the corporate bond market. The high-yield bond spread and investment-grade spread can explain 68 per cent and 42 per cent of output variations one year ahead, while the term spread based on government debts can explain only 12 per cent of them.

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Topic(s): Financial markets, Monetary and financial indicators, Monetary policy transmission JEL Code(s): E, E3, E5, G, G1

• Entrepreneurship, Inequality, and Taxation

  Staff Working Paper 2002-14 Césaire Meh

  This paper confirms the conjecture that the evaluation of tax policy leads to very different conclusions once the role of entrepreneurs is considered. Contrary to previous literature, the author finds that switching from a progressive to a proportional income tax system has a negligible effect on wealth inequality in the United States.

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Topic(s): Economic models, Fiscal policy JEL Code(s): D, D3, D31, E, E6, E62, H, H2, H20, H23

• Towards a More Complete Debt Strategy Simulation Framework

  Staff Working Paper 2002-13 David Bolder

  An effective technique governments use to evaluate the desirability of different financing strategies involves stochastic simulation. This approach requires the postulation of the future dynamics of key macroeconomic variables and the use of those variables in the construction of a debt charge distribution for each individual financing strategy.

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Topic(s): Debt management, Econometric and statistical methods, Interest rates JEL Code(s): C, C0, C5, G, G0