Apostolos Serletis

Macroeconomic Policy in the Canadian Economy investigates developments in Canada over the last forty years, using recent advances in the field of applied econometrics. In particular, the book analyzes the theoretical foundations of public sector activities and evaluates the several theories of government growth. Issues of convergence are also investigated as they manifest themselves in per capita income across Canadian provinces, and as to how successful government income equalization policies have been in furthering such convergence. Moreover, the openness of the Canadian economy is investigated in terms of the importance of exports on GDP growth and of its participation in the world of an internationally integrated capital market. The book also analyzes monetary policy issues and investigates the role of monetary aggregates and the effectiveness of monetary policy. Finally, it addresses the issue of the existence or not of electoral and partisan cycles in Canada, by incorporating both fiscal and monetary principles and applying them to the lively world of Canadian politics.

The relationship between the price of oil and the level of economic activity is a fundamental issue in macroeconomics. There is an ongoing debate in the literature about whether positive oil price shocks cause recessions in the United States (and other oil-importing countries), and although there exists a vast empirical literature that investigates the effects of oil price shocks, there are relatively few studies that investigate the direct effects of uncertainty about oil prices on the real economy. The book uses recent advances in macroeconomics and financial economics to investigate the effects of oil price shocks and uncertainty about the price of oil on the level of economic activity.

Interfuel substitution is an issue that is — and will likely remain — an important topic of inquiry for many years, as governments around the world seek to set policies that are intended to restrain carbon emissions or steer economies toward or away from certain fuels. This book contributes to this issue by estimating short- and long-term interfuel substitution elasticities, at the aggregate and sector levels, through the use of the latest advances in microeconometrics as well as recent international data for a number of OECD and non-OECD countries.

A leading economist contends that the recent financial crisis was caused not by the failure of mainstream economics but by corrupted monetary data constructed without reference to economics.Blame for the recent financial crisis and subsequent recession has commonly been assigned to everyone from Wall Street firms to individual homeowners. It has been widely argued that the crisis and recession were caused by "greed" and the failure of mainstream economics. In Getting It Wrong, leading economist William Barnett argues instead that there was too little use of the relevant economics, especially from the literature on economic measurement. Barnett contends that as financial instruments became more complex, the simple-sum monetary aggregation formulas used by central banks, including the U.S. Federal Reserve, became obsolete. Instead, a major increase in public availability of best-practice data was needed. Households, firms, and governments, lacking the requisite information, incorrectly assessed systemic risk and significantly increased their leverage and risk-taking activities. Better financial data, Barnett argues, could have signaled the misperceptions and prevented the erroneous systemic-risk assessments.When extensive, best-practice information is not available from the central bank, increased regulation can constrain the adverse consequences of ill-informed decisions. Instead, there was deregulation. The result, Barnett argues, was a worst-case toxic mix: increasing complexity of financial instruments, inadequate and poor-quality data, and declining regulation.Following his accessible narrative of the deep causes of the crisis and the long history of private and public errors, Barnett provides technical appendixes, containing the mathematical analysis supporting his arguments.

Almost half a century has elapsed since the demand for money began to attract widespread attention from economists and econometricians, and it has been a topic of ongoing controversy and research ever since. Interest in the topic stemmed from three principal sources. Firstofall,therewasthematter oftheinternaldynamicsofmacr- conomics, to which Harry Johnson drew attention in his 1971 Ely Lecture on “The Keynesian Revolution and the Monetarist Counter- Revolution,” American Economic Review 61 (May 1971). The main lesson about money that had been drawn from the so-called “Key- sian Revolution” was — rightly or wrongly — that it didn’t matter all that much. The inherited wisdom that undergraduates absorbed in the 1950s was that macroeconomics was above all about the determination of income and employment, that the critical factors here were saving and investment decisions, and that monetary factors, to the extent that they mattered at all, only had an in?uence on these all important variables through a rather narrow range of market interest rates. C- ventional wisdom never goes unchallenged in economics, except where its creators manage to control access to graduate schools and the jo- nals,anditiswithnocynicalintentthatIcon?rmJohnson’ssuggestion that those of us who embarked on academic careers in the ’60s found in this wisdom a ready-made target.

Almost half a century has elapsed since the demand for money began to attract widespread attention from economists and econometricians, and it has been a topic of ongoing controversy and research ever since. Interest in the topic stemmed from three principal sources. Firstofall,therewasthematter oftheinternaldynamicsofmacr- conomics, to which Harry Johnson drew attention in his 1971 Ely Lecture on “The Keynesian Revolution and the Monetarist Counter- Revolution,” American Economic Review 61 (May 1971). The main lesson about money that had been drawn from the so-called “Key- sian Revolution” was — rightly or wrongly — that it didn’t matter all that much. The inherited wisdom that undergraduates absorbed in the 1950s was that macroeconomics was above all about the determination of income and employment, that the critical factors here were saving and investment decisions, and that monetary factors, to the extent that they mattered at all, only had an in?uence on these all important variables through a rather narrow range of market interest rates. C- ventional wisdom never goes unchallenged in economics, except where its creators manage to control access to graduate schools and the jo- nals,anditiswithnocynicalintentthatIcon?rmJohnson’ssuggestion that those of us who embarked on academic careers in the ’60s found in this wisdom a ready-made target.

Macroeconomic Policy in the Canadian Economy investigates developments in Canada over the last forty years, using recent advances in the field of applied econometrics. In particular, the book analyzes the theoretical foundations of public sector activities and evaluates the several theories of government growth. Issues of convergence are also investigated as they manifest themselves in per capita income across Canadian provinces, and as to how successful government income equalization policies have been in furthering such convergence. Moreover, the openness of the Canadian economy is investigated in terms of the importance of exports on GDP growth and of its participation in the world of an internationally integrated capital market. The book also analyzes monetary policy issues and investigates the role of monetary aggregates and the effectiveness of monetary policy. Finally, it addresses the issue of the existence or not of electoral and partisan cycles in Canada, by incorporating both fiscal and monetary principles and applying them to the lively world of Canadian politics.