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 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...

This paper examines the policy rate recommendations of the Bank of Canada’s Governing Council (GC) and the C.D. Howe Institute’s (CDHI) Monetary Policy Council (MPC) since 2003. We find, first, that differences in the median recommendations between the MPC and the GC are persistent but small...

The U.S. recovery from the Great Recession has been slow relative to other postwar-era recoveries in the United States. Encouraged by loose lending standards in the pre-crisis period, U.S. households took on unsustainable amounts of debt, making them vulnerable to adverse shocks. Subsequently, a...

This paper uses uniquely rich and representative data on the unit values of “outputs” (products) and inputs of Colombian manufacturing plants to draw inferences about the extent of quality differentiation at the plant level. We extend the Melitz (2003) framework to include heterogeneity of...

There exist a variety of reasons for the failure to find a unique cointegrating relationship between economic time series where one would normally be expected on economic theory grounds. Among these are the testing procedure (e.g., Engle and Granger (1987) or Johansen (1991), the span of the...