An economy's level of potential output plays a central (and critical) role in the formulation of monetary policy focused on maintaining low and stable inflation. Assuming that potential output is determined mainly by the quantity and quality of its productive factors and the level of technology,...

This paper uses a small, calibrated forward-looking model of the euro-area economy to investigate the implications of incomplete information about potential output for the conduct and the design of monetary policy. Three sets of issues are examined. First, the certainty-equivalent optimal policy...

The effective conduct of monetary policy is complicated by uncertainty about the level of potential output, and thus about the size of the monetary policy response that would be sufficient to achieve the targeted inflation rate. One possible response to such uncertainty is for the monetary...

The author describes results obtained by using a new methodology to estimate potential output for the United Kingdom. The estimation method, which follows Rennison (2003) and Gosselin and Lalonde (2002), shows that combining the use of a Hodrick-Prescott filter and a structural vector...

An optimizing model of a small open emerging market economy (SOEME) with dualistic labour markets and two types of consumers, delivers a tractable model for monetary policy. Differences between the SOEME and the SOE are derived. Parameters depend on features of the labour market and on...

A major development in the Canadian labour market in the 1990s has been the decline in labour force participation. This issue of Canadian Business Economics consists of a symposium of articles that explore this issue. The idea for this symposium came out of a December 1997 workshop on labour...

The aim of this paper is to achieve a reliable estimate of the output gap for Italy through the development of several models within the class of the unobserved component time series models. These formulations imply the decomposition of output into a trend component (the 'potential output') and...

This paper proposes a simple explanation for the frequent appearance of a price puzzle in VARs designed for monetary policy analysis. It suggests that the best method of solving the puzzle implies a close connection between theory and empirics rather than the introduction of a commodity price....

The output gap, defined as actual less potential output, is an important variable in its own right and as an indicator of incipient changes in inflation. This paper reviews five methods of estimating it for Australian GDP data, including linear time trends, Hodrick-Prescott (HP) filter trends,...