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Weak identification is likely to be prevalent in multi-equation macroeconomic models such as in dynamic stochastic general equilibrium setups. Identification difficulties cause the breakdown of standard asymptotic procedures, making inference unreliable.

The author constructs a formal analytic framework to simulate the impact of various economic shocks on the household debt-service ratio, using data from the Canadian Financial Monitor (CFM) survey.

The author proposes a new test for financial contagion based on a non-parametric measure of the cross-market correlation. The test does not depend on the assumption that the data are drawn from a given probability distribution; therefore, it allows for maximal flexibility in fitting into the data.

A number of central banks publish their own business conditions survey based on non-random sampling methods. The results of these surveys influence monetary policy decisions and thus affect expectations in financial markets. To date, however, no one has computed the statistical accuracy of these surveys because their respective non-random sampling method renders this assessment non-trivial.

Using identification-robust methods, the authors estimate and evaluate for Canada and the United States various classes of inflation equations based on generalized structural Calvo-type models. The models allow for different forms of frictions and vary in their assumptions regarding the type of price indexation adopted by firms.

Treating imports as intermediate inputs to domestic production, the author adopts the translog function approach to model real gross domestic income (GDI) in Canada over the 1961–2006 period. She explores the role of price ratios, such as terms of trade and the real effective exchange rate, in explaining changes in real GDI, trade openness, trade […]

In continental Europe, labour shares in national income have exhibited considerable variation since 1970. Empirical and theoretical research suggests that the evolution of labour markets and labour market imperfections can, in part, explain this phenomenon.

Although the concept of monetary policy lag has historical roots deep in the monetary economics literature, relatively little attention has been paid to the idea. In this paper, we build on Svensson's (1997) inflation targeting framework by explicitly taking into account the lagged effect of monetary policy and characterize the optimal monetary policy reaction function both in the absence and in the presence of the zero lower bound on the nominal interest rate.

The intertemporal approach to the current account suggests modeling movements in the current account in a forward-looking, dynamic framework. In this framework, the current account reflects consumption smoothing of agents that lend and borrow from the rest of the world in the face of transitory shocks to income.

We use a method similar to Google's PageRank procedure to rank banks in the Canadian Large Value Transfer System (LVTS). Along the way we obtain estimates of the payment processing speeds for the individual banks.