Since the advent of standard national accounts data over 60 years ago, economists have traditionally relied on monthly or quarterly data supplied by central statistical agencies for macroeconomic modelling and forecasting. However, technological advances of the past several years have resulted...

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...

Previous studies have shown that interest rate yield spreads contain useful information about future changes in inflation. However, such studies have for the most part focused on linear models, ignoring potential non-linearities between interest rates and inflation. Using two different...

Financial and monetary variables have long been known to contain useful leading information regarding economic activity. In this paper, the authors wish to determine whether the forecasting performance of such variables can be improved using neural network models. The main findings are that, at...

The debate on the order of integration of interest rates has long focused on the I(1) versus I(0) distinction. In this paper, we use instead the wavelet OLS estimator of Jensen (1999) to estimate the fractional integration parameters of several interest rates for the United States and Canada...

We propose a new test for a multivariate parametric conditional distribution of a vector of variables yt given a conditional vector xt. The proposed test is shown to have an asymptotic normal distribution under the null hypothesis, while being consistent for all fixed alternatives, and having...

This paper evaluates the forecasting performance of factor models for Canadian inflation. This type of model was introduced and examined by Stock and Watson (1999a), who have shown that it is quite promising for forecasting U.S. inflation. Using a dimension-reduction method similar to...

This paper examines the predictive content of the term structure of interest rates for economic activity in Canada. Recent papers for the United States and other countries find that the slope of the term structure is a very good predictor of output growth. We find a strong, positive relationship...

Historical narratives typically associate financial crises with credit expansions and asset price misalignments. The question is whether some combination of measures of credit and asset prices can be used to predict these events. Borio and Lowe (2002) answer this question in the affirmative for...