Staff working papers

In this study, the author presents a new forecast and analysis model for the U.S. economy (i.e., the USM model) constructed at the Bank of Canada. The USM has a number of advantages over its predecessor, the VSM model.

During the nineties, stock prices increased remarkably. The number of households owning stocks also rose considerably. If stock market wealth has an effect on consumers' decisions, then the rise in equity prices could have contributed to the growth in consumption in recent years.

This paper reports on an exploratory application to Canadian data of an approach pioneered by Martin Feldstein (1997, 1999). Feldstein finds that even at low inflation rates there are costs arising from the distortions introduced by the interaction of inflation with the taxation of income from capital (capital gains, dividends, and interest) in a less-than-perfectly-indexed tax system.

The swap market has enjoyed tremendous growth in the last decade. With government issues shrinking in supply and increased price volatilities, the swap term structure has emerged as an alternative pricing, benchmark, and hedging mechanism to the government term structure.

This paper uses trivariate generalized autoregressive conditional heteroscedasticity (GARCH) models to study price and volatility spillovers between the foreign exchange and associated money markets. Three models are estimated using data on U.S. dollar/Canadian dollar, U.S. dollar/Deutsche mark, and U.S. dollar/Japanese yen daily exchange rate returns together with returns on 90-day Eurodollar, Euro Canada, Euromark, and Euroyen deposits.

An important issue in the debate over the desirability of freer capital mobility for developing countries is whether capital flows have significant effects on economic growth. Proponents of capital account liberalization cite the growth-promoting attributes of capital inflows as a key benefit of financial integration for developing countries.

The argument advocating a moderate level of inflation based on the downward nominal-wage rigidity (DNWR) hypothesis rests on three factors: its presence, extent, and negative impact in the labour market. This paper focuses on the employment effect of DNWR.

The sticky-price model of aggregate fluctuations implies that countries with high trend inflation rates should exhibit less-persistent output fluctuations than countries with low trend inflation.

Using wavelets, the author estimates the fractional order of integration of a common long-run money-demand relationship whose parameters are obtained from a full-information maximum-likelihood procedure.

In this paper, we develop a new way to test hypotheses about policy-makers' targets, and we implement that test for Canadian monetary policy.