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Housing starts and building permits data are commonly used as leading indicators of economic activity. In British Columbia, all new homes must be registered with the Homeowner Protection Office, a branch of BC Housing, before the issuance of building permits and the start of construction.

We add agency costs as in Carlstrom and Fuerst (1997) into a two-country, two-good international business-cycle model. In our model, changes in the relative price of investment arise endogenously.

Average hourly real wage series from the Labor Productivity and Costs (LPC) program and the Current Employment Statistics (CES) program have evolved very differently over the past decades.

The Bank of Canada recently launched a quarterly survey to measure the expectations of Canadian households: the Canadian Survey of Consumer Expectations (CSCE). The data collected provide comprehensive information about consumer expectations for and uncertainty about inflation, the labour market and household finance. This article describes the CSCE and illustrates its potential to offer rich information about Canadian consumers for researchers and policy-makers.

While the CPI is the most commonly used measure to track inflation, it is not fully consistent with a true cost-of-living index (COLI). Although the official treatment of durable goods and housing in the CPI represents an acceptable compromise in the current environment of low and stable inflation, Sabourin and Duguay suggest that it would be worthwhile to consider treating housing and durables in the same way and bringing the actual CPI closer to a COLI. This could be accomplished by employing an enhanced user-cost approach to calculate the imputed cost of the services provided by the use of durable goods or housing.

Emerging-market economies have become increasingly important in driving global GDP growth over the past 10 to 15 years. This has made timely and accurate assessment of current and future economic activity in emerging markets important for policy-makers not only in these countries but also in advanced economies.

This paper evaluates the usefulness of various measures of core inflation for the conduct of monetary policy. Traditional exclusion-based measures of core inflation are found to perform relatively poorly across a range of evaluation criteria, in part due to their inability to filter unanticipated transitory shocks.

In an open economy such as Canada’s, exchange rate movements can have a material impact on consumer prices. This is particularly important in the current context, with the significant depreciation of the Canadian dollar vis-a-vis the U.S. dollar since late 2012.

This paper takes a full-information model-based approach to evaluate the link between investment-specific technology and the inverse of the relative price of investment. The two-sector model presented includes monopolistic competition where firms can vary the markup charged on their product depending on the number of firms competing.

This paper introduces new weighting schemes for model averaging when one is interested in combining discrete forecasts from competing Markov-switching models. In particular, we extend two existing classes of combination schemes – Bayesian (static) model averaging and dynamic model averaging – so as to explicitly reflect the objective of forecasting a discrete outcome.