The authors estimate a small monthly macroeconometric model (BEAM, for bonds, equity, and money) of the Canadian economy built around three cointegrating relationships linking financial and real variables over the 1975–2002 period. One of the cointegrating relationships allows the...

The author studies the macroeconomic consequences of discretionary changes in the fiscal policy instruments for Canada. He adopts a semi-structural vector autoregression framework. Restrictions are based on institutional interactions between some policy and non-policy instruments that mimic a...

The international business literature measures the link between the degree of internationalization (DOI) of a firm's activities and its performance. The results of this literature are mixed. The authors extend the analysis to Canadian bank-level data, but they also take into account the...

More than 80 central banks use a committee to take monetary policy decisions. The composition of the committee and the structure of the meeting can affect the quality of the decision making. In this paper we review economic, experimental, sociological and psychological studies to identify...

Freeman (1999) proposes a model in which discount window lending and open market operations have different effects. This is important because in most of the literature, these policies are indistinguishable. However, Freeman's argument that the central bank should absorb losses associated with...

The substantial growth in wealth over the course of the second half of the 1990s generated the equivalent of a certain level of savings, while simultaneously causing household savings rates to fall significantly. The author seeks to explain this decline in savings, observed since 1995, using the...

A recent paper has suggested there might be a trade-off between inflation and unemployment at low inflation rates and this has led some economists to recommend that Canada increase its inflation rate. Underlying this view is the idea that, because firms are reluctant to cut workers' nominal...

Trades in foreign exchange markets are initiated around the world and around the clock. This study illustrates that trades are more informative when initiated in a local country or in major foreign exchange centers like London and New York. Evidence suggests that informational asymmetries based...

In this paper, the authors survey some of the recent techniques proposed in the literature to measure the trend component of output or potential output. Given the reported shortcomings of mechanical filters and univariate approaches to estimate potential output, the paper focusses on three...

The author uses panel data to assess the sensitivity of investment to cash flow in non-financial firms, taking into account the role their financial health plays in investment decisions. Firms are categorized using a method called the Z-score, a contemporaneous indicator of financial stress that...