Can Structural Small Open Economy Models Account for the Influence of Foreign Disturbances?

This paper evaluates whether an estimated, structural, small open economy model of the Canadian economy can account for the substantial influence of foreign-sourced disturbances identified in numerous reduced-form studies. The analysis shows that the benchmark model --- and a number of variants which include a range of market imperfections --- imply cross-equation restrictions that are too stringent when confronted with the data, yielding implausible parameter estimates. While appropriate choice of ad hoc disturbances can relax these cross-equation restrictions and therefore capture certain properties of the data --- for instance, the volatility and persistence of the real exchange rate --- and yield plausible parameter estimates, this success is qualified by the model's inability to account for the transmission of foreign disturbances to the domestic economy: less than one percent of the variance of output is explained by foreign shocks