The authors examine the Bank of Canada's overnight rate as a measure of monetary policy in vector autoregression (VAR) models.

A vector error-correction Model (VECM) that Forecasts inflation between the current quarter and eight quarters ahead is found to privide significant leading information about inflation. The model focusses on th effects of deviations of M1 from its long-run demand but also includes, among other...

This study describes a simple model for predicting the real U.S. exchange rate. Starting with a large number of error-correction models, the authors choose the one giving the best out-of-sample forecasts over the period 1992Q3 - 2002Q1. In the selected model, the effective real exchange rate is...

Real rigidities that limit the responsiveness of real marginal cost to output are a key ingredient of sticky price models necessary to account for the dynamics of output and inflation. We argue here, in the spirit of Bils and Kahn (2000), that the behavior of marginal cost over the cycle is...

The authors evaluate whether an assortment of simple rules could improve how the Bank of Canada implements its inflation-targeting monetary policy. They focus on measuring the correlation between the deviations of inflation from the target and the lagged deviations of rule recommendations from...

This paper surveys the recent literature on optimal currency areas (OCAs). Topics that are covered include theoretical developments in the context of general-equilibrium models and empirical work on shocks asymmetry and adjustment mechanisms. Issues relating to the endogeneity of OCA criteria,...

How can policy-makers avoid large policy errors when they are uncertain about the true model of the economy? The author discusses some recent approaches that can be used for that purpose under two alternative scenarios: (i) the policy-maker has one reference model for choosing policy but cannot...

The governance challenges facing the International Monetary Fund (IMF) are not simply limited to representation and voice, and the associated question of quota allocation. The author identifies governance issues that hitherto remained largely ignored by the literature and policy-makers alike....

We show how to use optimal control theory to derive optimal time-consistent Markov-perfect government policies in nonlinear dynamic general equilibrium models, extending the result of Cohen and Michel (1988) for models with quadratic objective functions and linear dynamics. We replace private...