Why do employed persons in large firms earn more than employed persons in small firms, even after controlling for observable characteristics? Complementary to previous results, this paper proposes a mechanism that gives an answer to this question. In the model, individuals accumulate human...

The authors develop and estimate an equilibrium-based model of the Canadian term structure of interest rates. The proposed model incorporates a vector-autoregression description of key macroeconomic dynamics and links them to those of the term structure, where identifying restrictions are based...

This paper revisits Canada's pioneering experience with floating exchange rate over the period 1950–1962. It examines whether the floating rate was the best option for Canada in the 1950s by developing and estimating a New Keynesian small open economy model of the Canadian economy. The model...

This paper studies the interdependence between fiscal and monetary policies, and their joint role in the determination of the price level ...

This paper discusses the merits and shortcomings of alternative price indices used in constructing real effective exchange rate indices and examines the effects of different weighting schemes. It also compares selected measures of the real effective exchange rate in terms of their ability to...

The author evaluates the ability of a variety of output-gap estimators to accurately measure the output gap in a model economy. A small estimated model of the Canadian economy is used to generate artificial data. Using output and inflation data generated by this model, the author uses each...

Inflation forecasting is fundamental to monetary policy. In practice, however, economists are faced with competing goals: accuracy and theoretical consistency. Recent work by Fuhrer and Moore (1995), Galí and Gertler (1999), Galí, Gertler, and Lopez-Salido (2001), Sbordone (2002), and Kozicki...

In many mainstream macroeconomic models, sticky prices play an important role in explaining the effects of monetary policy on the economy. Various theories have been set forth to explain why prices are sticky. This study takes a firm-level survey approach, in a spirit similar to Blinder et al....

Recent research on the new Phillips curve (NPC) (e.g., Galí, Gertler, and López-Salido 2001a) gives marginal cost an important role in capturing pressures on inflation. In this paper we assess the case for using alternative measures of marginal cost to improve the empirical fit of the NPC....