Technical Reports
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Constraints on the Conduct of Canadian Monetary Policy in the 1990s: Dealing with Uncertainty in Financial Markets
Canada's economic performance in the first half of the 1990s was adversely affected by high premiums in interest rates that were brought on by political and economic uncertainties. -
Measurement of the Output Gap: A Discussion of Recent Research at the Bank of Canada
In this paper, we discuss some methodologies for estimating potential output and the output gap that have recently been studied at the Bank of Canada. The assumptions and econometric techniques used by the different methodologies are discussed in turn, and applications to Canadian data are presented. -
Do Mechanical Filters Provide a Good Approximation of Business Cycles?
In this paper, the authors examine how well the Hodrick-Prescott filter (HP) and the band-pass filter recently proposed by Baxter and King (BK) extract the business-cycle component of macroeconomic time series. -
The Bank of Canada's New Quarterly Projection Model, Part 4. A Semi-Structural Method to Estimate Potential Output: Combining Economic Theory with a Time-Series Filter
The level of potential output plays a central role in the Bank of Canada's new Quarterly Projection Model (QPM). This report, the fourth in a series documenting QPM, describes a general method to measure potential output, as well as its implementation in the QPM system. -
Excess Volatility and Speculative Bubbles in the Canadian Dollar: Real or Imagined?
Greater intervention by the public sector is often proposed as a solution to the increased speculation and excessive price volatility thought to characterize today's competitive world financial system. -
The Bank of Canada's New Quarterly Projection Model, Part 3. The Dynamic Model: QPM
The 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. -
The Electronic Purse: An Overview of Recent Developments and Policy Issues
Futurists have been speculating about the prospects for a cashless society for many years, and such predictions became more frequent following the introduction of "smart" cards - cards containing a computer chip - in the mid-1970s. -
The Bank of Canada's New Quarterly Projection Model, Part 2. A Robust Method for Simulating Forward-Looking Models
In 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, […] -
The Bank of Canada's New Quarterly Projection Model, Part 1. The Steady-State Model: SSQPM
This 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 […]