The authors test the statistical significance of Pindyck's (1999) suggested class of econometric equations that model the behaviour of long-run real energy prices.
The author proposes a class of exact tests of the null hypothesis of exchangeable forecast errors and, hence, of the hypothesis of no difference in the unconditional accuracy of two competing forecasts.
Phillips curves are generally estimated under the assumption of linearity and parameter constancy. Linear models of inflation, however, have recently been criticized for their poor forecasting performance.
Debt strategy is defined as the manner in which a government finances an excess of government expenditures over revenues and any maturing debt issued in previous periods. The author gives a thorough qualitative description of the complexities of debt strategy analysis and then demonstrates that it is, in fact, a problem in stochastic optimal control.
Postulating two different specifications for the Canadian Phillips curve (a purely backwardlooking model, and a partly backward-, partly forward-looking model), the authors test for structural breaks in the parameters of the equation. In each case, they account for the possibilities that: (i) breaks can be discrete, or continuous, and (ii) available data samples may be too small to justify using asymptotically valid structural-change tests.
A number of authors have suggested that economies face a long-run inflation-unemployment trade-off due to downward nominal-wage rigidity. This theory has implications for the nature of the short-run Phillips curve when wage inflation is low.
There currently exists in the literature several continuous-time one-factor models for short-term interest rates. This paper considers a wide range of these models that are nested into one general model. These models are approximated using both a discrete-time model and a model that accounts for aggregation effects over time, and are estimated by both the […]
The menu-cost models of price adjustment developed by Ball and Mankiw (1994;1995) predict that short-run movements in inflation should be positively related to the skewness and the variance of the distribution of disaggregated relative-price shocks in each period. We test these predictions on Canadian data using the distribution of changes in disaggregated producer prices to measure the skewness and standard deviation of relative-price shocks.
A recent paper has suggested there might be a trade-off between inflation and unemployment at low inflation rates and this has led some economists to recommend that Canada increase its inflation rate.