Zero-coupon interest rates are the fundamental building block of fixed-income mathematics, and as such have an extensive number of applications in both finance and economics.
The first step in designing effective policies to stabilize an economy is to understand business cycles. No country is isolated from the world economy and external shocks are becoming increasingly important.
According to the Fisher hypothesis, the gap between Canadian nominal and Real Return Bond yields (or break-even inflation rate) should be a good measure of inflation expectations.
The author empirically tests two aspects of the interaction between financial variables and inventory investment: negative cash flow and finance constraints due to asymmetric information.
In two recent papers, Jensen (2002) and Walsh (2003), using a hybrid New Keynesian model, demonstrate that a regime that targets either nominal income growth or the change in the output gap can effectively replicate the outcome under commitment and hence reduce the size of the stabilization bias.
The authors examine the evidence presented by Galí and Gertler (1999) and Galí, Gertler, and Lopez-Salido (2001, 2003) that the inflation dynamics in the United States can be well-described by the New Keynesian Phillips curve (NKPC).