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...

We estimate real U.S. GDP growth as a threshold autoregressive process, and construct confidence intervals for the parameter estimates. However, there are various approaches that can be used in constructing the confidence intervals. Specifically, standard- t , bootstrap- t , and...

This paper estimates standard and extended Taylor rules for core countries in the euro area, namely France, Germany and Italy, as well as for the ECB. We perform extensive tests for over-identifying restrictions and instrument relevance, a practice generally eschewed in previous work. We find...

This paper examines the role of the ECB communication activities on daily Eurodollar exchange rate and interest rates. We estimate the relationship between monetary policy and the exchange rate using a technique that explicitly recognizes the joint determination of both the levels and...

We introduce an index of ex ante exchange market pressure (EMP) that can be used as a benchmark against which to measure the effectiveness of sterilized intervention. Ex ante EMP is the change in the exchange rate that would be observed if the authorities refrain from intervening and agents...

This paper uses uniquely rich and representative data on the unit values of “outputs” (products) and inputs of Colombian manufacturing plants to draw inferences about the extent of quality differentiation at the plant level. We extend the Melitz (2003) framework to include heterogeneity of...

The study uses individual data from the Canadian Labour Force Survey to consider economic factors in university participation decisions by persons aged 17-24 from 1976 to 2003. The level of real tuition is one economic factor that may affect the university participation decision. There is also...

We investigate whether exporting firms generate possibilities for productivity enhancement by other firms through spillovers. While spillovers have been analyzed when domestic learn from foreign-owned firms, we consider the possibility of learning from firms that export, irrespective of...

This paper considers a successive oligopoly setting in which a set of upstream firms sell output non-exclusively to a group of downstream firms using a linear tariff. If the concavity of retail demand is constant then the profitability of horizontal merger at either the upstream or the...

This paper examines the impact of oil and gas facilities on rural residential property values using data from central Alberta, Canada. The influences are evaluated using two groups of variables characterizing hazard effects and amenity effects. A spatial error model was employed to capture the...