Recent events highlight the importance of understanding the relationship between credit availability and real economic activity. This paper estimates macroeconomic models for Canada to investigate the relationship between changes in non-price lending standards, business loans and output. We...

We estimate real U.S. GDP growth as a threshold autoregressive process, and construct confidence intervals for the parameter estimates. However, there are various approaches that can be used in constructing the confidence intervals. Specifically, standard- t , bootstrap- t , and...

This paper estimates standard and extended Taylor rules for core countries in the euro area, namely France, Germany and Italy, as well as for the ECB. We perform extensive tests for over-identifying restrictions and instrument relevance, a practice generally eschewed in previous work. We find...

This paper examines the role of the ECB communication activities on daily Eurodollar exchange rate and interest rates. We estimate the relationship between monetary policy and the exchange rate using a technique that explicitly recognizes the joint determination of both the levels and...

We introduce an index of ex ante exchange market pressure (EMP) that can be used as a benchmark against which to measure the effectiveness of sterilized intervention. Ex ante EMP is the change in the exchange rate that would be observed if the authorities refrain from intervening and agents...

We present the current Italian economic crisis as a phase of a major systemic decline. We argue that “Italy’s system” has forced the country to abandon a “dynamic” view of comparative advantage, crucial for sustained economic growth, in favour of a “static” view of specialization....

This study examines the gender gaps in average hourly wages facing private sector full time employees in the Canadian provinces, using data from the Canadian Labour Force Survey. Over the 1997-2014 period, all provinces have made progress toward narrowing the gender wage gap, though notably...