Research
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Relative Prices, Trading Gains, and Real GDI: The Case of Canada
Treating imports as intermediate inputs to domestic production, the author adopts the translog function approach to model real gross domestic income (GDI) in Canada over the 1961–2006 period. She explores the role of price ratios, such as terms of trade and the real effective exchange rate, in explaining changes in real GDI, trade openness, trade […] -
Emerging Asia's Impact on Food and Oil Prices: A Model-Based Analysis
The authors explore the usefulness of macroeconomic models in analyzing global economic developments by examining movements in commodity prices between July 2007 and July 2008. They use the Bank of Canada's version of the Global Economy Model and investigate the longer-term outlook for commodity prices by constructing two different, globally consistent, scenarios for emerging Asia. -
Labour Shares and the Role of Capital and Labour Market Imperfections
In continental Europe, labour shares in national income have exhibited considerable variation since 1970. Empirical and theoretical research suggests that the evolution of labour markets and labour market imperfections can, in part, explain this phenomenon. -
Canada and the IMF: Trailblazer or Prodigal Son?
Canada played an important role in the postwar establishment of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), yet it was also the first major member to challenge the orthodoxy of the BrettonWoods par value system by abandoning it in 1950 in favour of a floating, market-determined exchange rate. -
Inventories, Markups, and Real Rigidities in Menu Cost Models
Real rigidities that limit the responsiveness of real marginal cost to output are a key ingredient of sticky price models necessary to account for the dynamics of output and inflation. We argue here, in the spirit of Bils and Kahn (2000), that the behavior of marginal cost over the cycle is directly related to that of inventories, data on which is readily available. -
Comparison of Auction Formats in Canadian Government Auctions
Using a rich sample of Canadian government securities auctions, we estimate the structural parameters of a share-auction model accounting for asymmetries across bidders. We find little evidence of asymmetries between participants at Canadian government nominal bond auctions. -
What Accounts for the U.S.-Canada Education-Premium Difference?
This paper analyzes the differences in wage ratios of university graduates to less than university graduates, the education premium, in Canada and the United States from 1980 to 2000. Both countries experienced a similar increase in the fraction of university graduates and a similar increase in skill biased technological change based on capital-embodied technological progress, but only the United States had a large increase in the education premium. -
Uninsurable Investment Risks and Capital Income Taxation
This paper studies the capital accumulation and welfare implications of reducing capital income taxation in a general equilibrium economy with uninsurable investment risks. -
Monetary Policy Lag, Zero Lower Bound, and Inflation Targeting
Although the concept of monetary policy lag has historical roots deep in the monetary economics literature, relatively little attention has been paid to the idea. In this paper, we build on Svensson's (1997) inflation targeting framework by explicitly taking into account the lagged effect of monetary policy and characterize the optimal monetary policy reaction function both in the absence and in the presence of the zero lower bound on the nominal interest rate.