In the aftermath of the recent debt crisis, many countries are implementing nonlinear fiscal policy rules, whereby the government’s responsiveness to debt must strengthen at higher levels of debt. This paper examines how a nonlinear fiscal policy rule affects the possibility of future...

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...

Under the flexible exchange rate regime, the Canadian economy is constantly af- fected by fluctuations in exchange rates. This paper focuses on the employment effect of the exchange rate in Canada. We find that appreciations of the Canadian dol- lar have significant effects on employment in...

We exploit a quasi-experiment in the province of Alberta, Canada, to identify how changes in the schedule of medical benefits affected the provision of primary care services to patients with multiple co-morbidities. Specically, Alberta introduced a new fee code to compensate physicians for...

Monetary policy decisions are typically taken after a committee has deliberated and voted on a proposal. However, there are well-known risks associated with committee-based decisions. In this paper we examine the record of the shadow Monetary Policy Council in Canada. Given the structure of the...