Dividing the burden for greenhouse gas abatement amongst the provinces has proven challenging in Canada, and is a major factor contributing to Canada’s poor historic performance on greenhouse gas abatement. As the country aims to achieve substantial cuts to emissions over the next decade and...

This paper extracts measures of monetary policy surprises for Australia, Canada and the United States using a latent factor framework. We distinguish monetary policy surprises which occur when central banks report new assessments of the economy (or do not reinforce changes expected by market...

This paper examines past evidence of prolonged periods of foreign exchange reserves accumulation in the Asia-Pacific region. Several proxies for this unobserved variable are considered, including a newly proposed one based on a factor model. We focus on identifying periods of prolonged...

Recent events highlight the importance of understanding the relationship between credit availability and real economic activity. This paper estimates macroeconomic models for Canada to investigate the relationship between changes in non-price lending standards, business loans and output. We ask...

Recent events highlight the importance of understanding the relationship between credit availability and real economic activity. This paper estimates macroeconomic models for Canada to investigate the relationship between changes in non-price lending standards, business loans and output. We ask...

This paper examines whether the introduction of Chinese stock index futures had an impact on the volatility of the underlying spot market. To this end, we estimate several Generalized Auto-Regressive Conditional Heteroscedasticity (GARCH) models and compare our findings for mainland China with...

We present the current Italian economic crisis as a phase of a major systemic decline. We argue that “Italy’s system” has forced the country to abandon a “dynamic” view of comparative advantage, crucial for sustained economic growth, in favour of a “static” view of specialization....

This study examines the gender gaps in average hourly wages facing private sector full time employees in the Canadian provinces, using data from the Canadian Labour Force Survey. Over the 1997-2014 period, all provinces have made progress toward narrowing the gender wage gap, though notably...

Every country has a fiscal limit on debt, where that limit represents a debt level so high that the country's economic and political systems cannot raise taxes or reduce spending sufficiently to maintain solvency. At the limit, creditors flee, and the government faces a fiscal crisis. If we knew...

The global nature of the climate change externality calls for a global response but so far none has emerged. Instead, climate policies are being implemented by subnational and national governments, resulting in a fragmented policy landscape at the national level. This is certainly the case in...