D - Microeconomics

• The Economic Theory of Retail Pricing: A Survey

  Staff Working Paper 2004-8 Oana Secrieru

  The types of contracts that arise in a typical vertical manufacturer–retailer relationship are more sophisticated than usually assumed in standard macroeconomic models.

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Research Topic(s): Market structure and pricing JEL Code(s): D, D4, D40, L, L2, L22, L4, L42

• Are Distorted Beliefs Too Good to be True?

  Staff Working Paper 2003-4 Miroslav Misina

  In a recent attempt to account for the equity-premium puzzle within a representative-agent model, Cecchetti, Lam, and Mark (2000) relax the assumption of rational expectations and in its place use the assumption of distorted beliefs. The author shows that the explanatory power of the distorted beliefs model is due to an inconsistency in the model and that an attempt to remove this inconsistency removes the model's explanatory power.

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Research Topic(s): Economic models, Financial markets JEL Code(s): D, D8, D84, G, G1, G12

• 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 Research 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 Research Topic(s): Economic models, Fiscal policy JEL Code(s): D, D3, D31, E, E6, E62, H, H2, H20, H23

• 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 Research Topic(s): Economic models, Fiscal policy JEL Code(s): D, D3, D31, E, E6, E62, H, H2, H20, H23

• Risk, Entropy, and the Transformation of Distributions

  Staff Working Paper 2002-11 Mark Reesor, Don McLeish

  The exponential family, relative entropy, and distortion are methods of transforming probability distributions. We establish a link between those methods, focusing on the relation between relative entropy and distortion.

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Research Topic(s): Econometric and statistical methods, Financial markets, Market structure and pricing JEL Code(s): C, C0, C1, D, D8, G, G0

• Liquidity of the Government of Canada Securities Market: Stylized Facts and Some Market Microstructure Comparisons to the United States Treasury Market

  Staff Working Paper 1999-11 Toni Gravelle

  The aims of this study are to examine how liquidity in the Government of Canada securities market has evolved over the 1990s and to determine what factors influence the level of liquidity in this market, with some comparisons to the U.S. Treasury securities market. We find empirical support for the hypothesis that an increase in […]

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Research Topic(s): Financial markets JEL Code(s): D, D4, G, G1, G2

• Measuring Potential Output within a State-Space Framework

  Staff Working Paper 1999-9 Maral Kichian

  In this paper we measure potential output (and consequently the output gap) using state-space models. Given that the estimated output gap is used as an indicator to measure the extent of inflationary pressures in the economy, we evaluate the use of such models for the implementation of monetary policy. Our starting point is the Gerlach […]

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Research Topic(s): Potential output JEL Code(s): D, D2, D24

• The Sale of Durable Goods by a Monopolist in a Stochastic Environment

  Staff Working Paper 1998-18 Gabriel Srour

  This paper examines the sale of durable goods by a monopolist in a stochastic partil equilibrium setting. It analyzes the responses of prices and output to various types of shocks and notes the differences with non-durable goods and competitive markets. It shows that behavior in this model with constant marginal costs of production is in […]

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Research Topic(s): Market structure and pricing JEL Code(s): D, D4

• Consumer Attitudes, Uncertainty, and Consumer Spending

  Staff Working Paper 1998-16 Denise Côté, Marianne Johnson

  This study examines the link between consumer expenditures and the Conference Board's Index of Consumer Attitudes, an index highly regarded for some time as a useful leading indicator of consumer expenditures. However, the theory that identifies why it may be useful in an analysis of consumption is less well established. To explore this question, we […]

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