Using a closed-economy model, Jensen (2002) and Walsh (2003) have, respectively, shown that a policy regime that optimally targets nominal income growth (NIT) or the change in the output gap (SLT) outperforms a regime that targets inflation, because NIT and SLT induce more inertia in the actions...

Recent empirical evidence suggests that private consumption is crowded-in by government spending. This outcome violates existing macroeconomic theory, according to which the negative wealth effect brought about by a rise in public expenditure should decrease consumption. In this paper, we...

The author studies the effects of capital reallocation (the flow of productive capital across firms and establishments mainly through changes in ownership) on aggregate labour productivity. Capital reallocation is an important activity in the United States: on average, its total value is 3-4 per...

This paper examines whether restructuring in the public sector contributed to the slower cyclical recovery in Canada than in the United States during the 1990s. Changes in public sector employment are used to investigate this question. The pressures that led up to the restructuring are explored...

This paper analyses how Canadian financial firms manage short-term interest rate risk through the use of BAX futures contracts. The results show that the most effective hedging strategy is, on average, a static strategy based on linear regression that assumes constant variances, even though...

Cette etude examine les effets de l'endettement du Canada sur les taux d'interet reels de long terme au Canada a l'aide de la methode des VECM (Vector Error Correction Model).

In an era when the primary policy instrument is the level of the short-term interest rate, a comparison of that rate with some equilibrium rate can be a useful guide for policy and a convenient method to measure the stance of monetary policy. The real interest rate gap—the difference between...

Changes in risk perception have been used in various contexts to explain shorter-term developments in financial markets, as part of a mechanism that amplifies fluctuations in financial markets, as well as in accounts of "irrational exuberance." This approach holds that changes in risk perception...

The sticky-price model of aggregate fluctuations implies that countries with high trend inflation rates should exhibit less-persistent output fluctuations than countries with low trend inflation. I conduct a cross-country analysis of output persistence and inflation that takes into account the...