Business fluctuations and cycles
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Technology Shocks and Business Cycles: The Role of Processing Stages and Nominal Rigidities
This paper develops and estimates a dynamic general equilibrium model that realistically accounts for an input-output linkage between firms operating at different stages of processing. Firms face technological change which is specific to their processing stage and charge new prices according to stage-specific Calvo-probabilities. -
Housing Market Cycles and Duration Dependence in the United States and Canada
Housing wealth is a large component of total wealth and plays an important role in aggregate business cycles. In this paper, we explore data on real house price cycles at the aggregate level and city level for the United States and Canada. -
How Far Can Forecasting Models Forecast? Forecast Content Horizons for Some Important Macroeconomic Variables
For stationary transformations of variables, there exists a maximum horizon beyond which forecasts can provide no more information about the variable than is present in the unconditional mean. Meteorological forecasts, typically excepting only experimental or exploratory situations, are not reported beyond this horizon; by contrast, little generally accepted information about such maximum horizons is available for economic variables. -
December 20, 2006
Why Monetary Policy Matters: A Canadian Perspective
This article provides answers to several key questions about Canadian monetary policy. First, what is monetary policy? Second, why does the Bank of Canada focus on the control of inflation rather than other macroeconomic variables? Third, how do the Bank's actions influence the rate of inflation? And, finally, how can monetary policy deliver genuine and significant benefits to society? -
The Role of Debt and Equity Finance over the Business Cycle
The authors show that debt and equity issuance are procyclical for most listed U.S. firms. -
ToTEM: The Bank of Canada's New Quarterly Projection Model
The authors provide a detailed technical description of the Terms-of-Trade Economic Model (ToTEM), which replaced the Quarterly Projection Model (QPM) in December 2005 as the Bank's principal projection and policy-analysis model for the Canadian economy. -
October 22, 2006
ToTEM: The Bank of Canada's New Projection and Policy-Analysis Model
The Terms-of-Trade Economic Model, or ToTEM, replaced the Quarterly Projection Model (QPM) in December 2005 as the Bank's principal projection and policy-analysis model for the Canadian economy. Benefiting from advances in economic modelling and computer power, ToTEM builds on the strengths of QPM, allowing for optimizing behaviour on the part of firms and households, both in and out of steady state, in a multi-product environment. The authors explain the motivation behind the development of ToTEM, provide an overview of the model and its calibration, and present several simulations to illustrate its key properties, concluding with some indications of how the model is expected to evolve going forward. -
The Macroeconomic Effects of Non-Zero Trend Inflation
The authors study the macroeconomic effects of non-zero trend inflation in a simple dynamic stochastic general-equilibrium model with sticky prices. -
Linear and Threshold Forecasts of Output and Inflation with Stock and Housing Prices
The authors examine whether simple measures of Canadian equity and housing price misalignments contain leading information about output growth and inflation.