Over the past decade, questions over the impact of new information technologies on productivity growth trends have played an important role in the formulation of monetary policy, particularly in the United States and Canada. However, formal testing of whether the trend growth rate of aggregate...

This paper investigates the precision of multivariate models of the output gap and considers their implications for the formulation of macroeconomic policy. Multivariate models identify the gap by including information from structural economic relationships, such as Okun's Law, the Phillips...

A stable predictive relationship between inflation and the output gap, often referred to as a Phillips curve, provides the basis for empirical formulations of countercyclical monetary policy in many models. However, evidence for the usefulness of output gap measures for forecasting inflation is...