This paper examines how the scale and composition of public debt can affect economies that implement a combination of “passive” monetary policy and “active” fiscal policy. This policy configuration is argued to be of both historical and contemporary interest in the cases of the U.S. and Japanese economies. It is shown that higher average levels and moderate average maturities of debt can induce...

This paper analyses the macroeconomic content of 15 PRSPs from a growth and poverty reduction perspective. It finds that, in the main and contrary to new trends in developed and middle income countries, their macroeconomic policy frameworks lack the necessary flexibility to deal with external shocks and to appropriately address macroeconomic volatility. To ilustrate the point, their fiscal and ...

Initial announcements of macroeconomic indicators are based on imprecise and incomplete information. Government statistical agencies routinely restate the initial estimates over the course of several subsequent years as more information becomes available. We find that simple accounting-based aggregates, such as earnings dispersion, can predict future restatements in macroeconomic estimates, inc...

During the 2000s, however, housing put itself on the agenda. Increased interest in housing was reflected in academic literature, in media commentary and in government and industry concerns. At the macroeconomic level, the start of the decade brought the chicken and egg problem of rising house prices and increasing housing debt. This raised concerns about the impact of increasing housing debt on...

The formation of macroeconomic policy is conceptualized as on-going process of interaction between private individuals and a centralized policymaker. This interaction is inherently strategic in nature and lends itself to a gametheoretical treatment. Starting from the basic principle of rational expectations, the analysis advances a theoretical perspective on the related concepts of macroeconomi...

We study the joint dynamics of bond yields and macroeconomic variables in a New-Keynesian small open economy model complemented with a no-arbitrage term structure model. With Canadian data, we are able to study the impact of domestic and foreign (US) shocks on the yield curve. The unconditional variance decomposition of the yield level show that the movement of expected short rates is mainly dr...

The paper considers the macroeconomic impact of shocks to agricultural output and of negative and positive price shocks. It is shown that negative price shocks have particularly large externalities: it is estimated that the overall impact of these negative shocks on GDP may well be double their direct impact. In terms of policy, the presence of externalities justifies subsidising the provision ...

Although the IS/LM-AS/AD model is still the central tool of macroeconomic teaching in most macroeconomic textbooks, it has been criticized by several economists. Colander (1995) demonstrated that the framework is logically inconsistent, Romer (2000) showed that it is unable to deal with a monetary policy that uses the interest rate as its operating target, and Walsh criticized that it is not we...