A threshold vector autoregression (TVAR) is estimated to study the effects of oil price shocks on Canadian output and price level. While much of the literature has investigated potential asymmetric effects of positive and negative oil price shocks, we extend the analysis to consider asymmetries...

Despite a low unemployment rate, wage growth in the U.S. was negligible during the 2013-2015 period. Conventional linear models of the relationship between wages and unemployment, the so- called wage Phillips curve (WPC), and previous models of the WPC that rely on regime-switching driven only...

Within the context of threshold regressions, we show that asymptotically-valid likelihood-ratio-based confidence intervals for threshold parameters perform poorly in finite samples when the threshold effect is large. A large threshold effect leads to a poor approximation of the profile...

We estimate a Bayesian threshold vector autoregression (TVAR) to study the relationship between exchange rate pass-through and economic activity in Canada and Mexico. Both the model comparison and the analysis of impulse-response functions provide strong evidence of a nonlinear relationship and...

Using Monte Carlo simulations, this paper evaluates the ability of the trend-cycle decomposition approach of Hamilton (2018) to adequately identify asymmetries in business cycles fluctuations. By considering different specifications of linear and asymmetric processes consistent with previous...

We relax the assumption that recessions are all alike in studying whether U.S. health care employment is recession-proof. Because health care services are inelastic and largely driven by costs, we argue that economic conditions influence health care employment only to the extent that they...

This paper proposes the inversion of likelihood ratio tests for the construction of confidence intervals for multiple threshold parameters. Using Monte Carlo simulations, conservative likelihood-ratio-based confidence intervals are shown to exhibit empirical coverage rates at least as high as...