Staff working papers

Various measures indicate that inflation expectations evolve sluggishly relative to actual inflation. In addition, they often fail conventional tests of unbiasedness.

This paper continues the work started by Bolder and Stréliski (1999) and considers two alternative classes of models for extracting zero-coupon and forward rates from a set of observed Government of Canada bond and treasury-bill prices.

This paper shows how existing band-pass filtering techniques and their extension can be applied to the common current-analysis problem of estimating current trends or cycles.

This paper studies the persistent effects of monetary shocks on output. Previous empirical literature documents this persistence, but standard general-equilibrium models with sticky prices fail to generate output responses beyond the duration of nominal contracts.

This paper develops and estimates a dynamic general-equilibrium sticky-price model that accounts for real exchange rate persistence.

This paper develops and estimates a dynamic, stochastic, general-equilibrium model with price and wage stickiness to analyze monetary policy in Canada.

There is a large body of literature that studies the relationship between financial structure (that is, the degree to which the financial system is either market- or intermediary-based) and long-run economic growth.

This paper shows that if the Bank of Canada is optimally adjusting its monetary policy instrument in response to inflation indicators to target 2 per cent inflation at a two-year horizon, then deviations of inflation from 2 per cent represent the Bank's forecast errors, and should be uncorrelated with its information set, which includes two-year lagged values of the instrument and the indicators. Positive or negative correlations are evidence of systematic errors in monetary policy.

This paper assesses the usefulness of consumer confidence indexes in forecasting aggregate consumer spending in the United States.

This paper describes the positive effect that corporate income tax has on capital formation in the presence of liquidity constraints and uninsurable risk.