The authors develop a small open-economy dynamic stochastic general-equilibrium (DSGE) model in an attempt to understand the dynamic relationships in Canadian macroeconomic data.
The author presents a model of a twin crisis, in which foreign and domestic residents play a banking game. Both "honest" and run equilibria of the post-deposit subgame exist; some run equilibria lead to a currency crisis, as agents convert domestic currency to foreign currency.
Using a closed-economy model, Jensen (2002) and Walsh (2003) have, respectively, shown that a policy regime that optimally targets nominal income growth (NIT) or the change in the output gap (SLT) outperforms a regime that targets inflation, because NIT and SLT induce more inertia in the actions of the central bank, effectively replicating the outcome obtained under precommitment. The author obtains a very different result when the analysis is extended to open-economy models.
The authors assess the stabilization properties of simple monetary policy rules within the context of a small open-economy model constructed around the limited-participation assumption and calibrated to salient features of the Canadian economy. By relying on limited participation as the main nominal friction that affects the artificial economy, the authors provide an important check of the robustness of the results obtained using alternative environments in the literature on monetary policy rules, most notably the now-standard "New Keynesian" paradigm that emphasizes rigidities in the price-setting mechanism.
The authors evaluate whether an assortment of simple rules could improve how the Bank of Canada implements its inflation-targeting monetary policy. They focus on measuring the correlation between the deviations of inflation from the target and the lagged deviations of rule recommendations from the actual policy interest rate.
The author develops and estimates a quantitative dynamic-optimizing model of a small open economy (SOE) with domestic and import price stickiness and capital-adjustment costs. A monetary policy rule allows the central bank to systematically manage the short-term nominal interest rate in response to deviations of inflation, output, and money growth from their steadystate levels.
Changes in the financial industry result in new data that are inconsistent with the former presentation, and therefore adjustments are required to "adjust" or smooth out these breaks to establish continuity.
Technological innovations in the financial industry pose major problems for the measurement of monetary aggregates. The authors describe work on a new measure of money that has a more satisfactory means of identifying and removing the effects of financial innovations.
The author explores the role that Taylor-type rules can play in monetary policy, given the degree of uncertainty in the economy. The optimal rule is derived from a simple infinite-horizon model of the monetary transmission mechanism, with only additive uncertainty.