This paper uses the IMF’s macroeconomic model MULTIMOD to examine the implications of the zero interest rate floor (ZIF) for the design of monetary policy in Japan. Similar to findings in other studies, targeting rates of inflation lower than 2.0 per cent significantly increases the...

We discuss and reconcile the geological and economic/technological views concerning the future of world oil production and prices, and present a nonlinear econometric model of the world oil market that encompasses both views. The model performs far better than existing empirical models in...

This paper analyzes the scope for rules-based countercyclical fiscal policy in small open economies where a subset of households is liquidity-constrained. Relative to balanced budget rules, structural surplus rules significantly improve welfare. But they minimize fiscal instrument volatility...

[fre] Les chercheurs dans des institutions ayant pour responsabilité de formuler des politiques économiques ont déployé un effort significatif pour développer une nouvelle génération de modèles macro-économiques reposant sur des bases micro-économiques plus rigoureuses. L’article...

For thirty years, prominent voices have advocated a policy of starving the beast – cutting taxes to force government spending cuts. This paper analyzes the macroeconomic and welfare consequences of this policy using a two-country general equilibrium model. Under several strong assumptions, the...

We develop a five-region version (Canada, a group of oil exporting countries, the United States, emerging Asia and Japan plus the euro area) of the Global Economy Model (GEM) encompassing production and trade of crude oil, and use it to study the international transmission mechanism of shocks...