E - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics
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Improving Public Equity Markets? No Pain, No Gain
This paper quantifies the effects of improving public equity markets on macroeconomic aggregates and welfare. I use an open-economy extension of Angeletos (2007), where entrepreneurs face idiosyncratic productivity risk in privately held firms. -
Real-Time Nowcasting of Nominal GDP Under Structural Breaks
This paper provides a framework for the early assessment of current U.S. nominal GDP growth, which has been considered a potential new monetary policy target. The nowcasts are computed using the exact amount of information that policy-makers have available at the time predictions are made. However, real-time information arrives at different frequencies and asynchronously, which poses challenges of mixed frequencies, missing data and ragged edges. -
A New Approach to Infer Changes in the Synchronization of Business Cycle Phases
This paper proposes a Markov-switching framework to endogenously identify the following: (1) regimes where economies synchronously enter recessionary and expansionary phases; and (2) regimes where economies are unsynchronized, essentially following independent business cycles. -
Predicting Financial Stress Events: A Signal Extraction Approach
The objective of this paper is to propose an early warning system that can predict the likelihood of the occurrence of financial stress events within a given period of time. To achieve this goal, the signal extraction approach proposed by Kaminsky, Lizondo and Reinhart (1998) is used to monitor the evolution of a number of economic indicators that tend to exhibit an unusual behaviour in the periods preceding a financial stress event. -
Global Inflation Dynamics in the Post-Crisis Period: What Explains the Twin Puzzle?
Inflation dynamics in advanced countries have produced two consecutive puzzles during the years after the global financial crisis. The first puzzle emerged when inflation rates over the period 2009-11 were consistently higher than expected, although economic slack in advanced countries reached its highest level in recent history. -
Search Frictions, Financial Frictions and Labour Market Fluctuations in Emerging Markets
This paper examines the role of the extensive and intensive margins of labour input in the context of a business cycle model with a financial friction. We document significant variation in the hours worked per worker for many emerging-market economies. Both employment and hours worked per worker are positively correlated with each other and with output. -
Housework and Fiscal Expansions
We build an otherwise-standard business cycle model with housework, calibrated consistently with data on time use, in order to discipline consumption-hours complementarity and relate its strength to the size of fiscal multipliers. -
Commodity Price Co-Movement and Global Economic Activity
Guided by a macroeconomic model in which non-energy commodity prices are endogenously determined, we apply a new factor-based identification strategy to decompose the historical sources of changes in commodity prices and global economic activity. -
Analyzing and Forecasting the Canadian Economy through the LENS Model
The authors describe the key features of a new large-scale Canadian macroeconomic forecasting model developed over the past two years at the Bank of Canada.