Using Bayesian methods, we estimate a small open economy model in which consumers face limits to credit determined by the value of their housing stock. The purpose of this paper is to quantify the role of collateralized household debt in the Canadian business cycle. Our findings show that the...

Many recent papers, following Gali (1999), have found a negative response of employment to a positive technology shock identified as a permanent shock to labor productivity, contradicting the prediction of standard RBC models. In a recent paper, Christiano, Eichenbaum and Vigfusson (2003) get a...

New information and communication technology can be used to improve the productivity of public services and the responsiveness of government. However, as this paper suggests, without substantial re-engineering of the organisational relationship to the public, IT on its own will achieve little....

We propose alternative single-equation semi-structural models for forecasting inflation in Canada, whereby structural New Keynesian models are combined with time-series features in the data. Several marginal cost measures are used, including one that in addition to unit labour cost also...

In times of low-inflation, conventional monetary policy is perpetually exposed to the risk of being caught by the liquidity trap. As a part of a pre-emptive monetary policy to avoid the liquidity trap, many economists have pointed out that this risk can be possibly circumvented by targeting a...

Although the concept of monetary policy lag has historical roots deep in the monetary economics literature, relatively little attention has been paid to the idea. In this paper, we build on Svensson’s (1997) inflation targeting framework by explicitly taking into account the lagged effect of...

This paper addresses the empirical dilemma in identifying and estimating the parameters governing the intertemporal elasticity of substitution (IES) for import demand. We propose a new concept, the cross-Euler equation, for overcoming this empirical dilemma. IES parameters are estimated by...

We use the standard two-good version of the life cycle/permanent income model in analyzing the intratemporal and intertemporal aspect of food and non-food expenditure in Japan. The empirical dilemma in identifying and estimating the parameters governing the intertemporal elasticity of...