Staff research

This paper examines how market-perceived AI exposure is associated with extreme financial-sector gains and losses across five markets, using Expected Shortfall and skewness decompositions to distinguish AI-sector, macroeconomic, systemic and financial scenarios.

Positive commodity price shocks reduce labor income inequality in commodity-exporting economies by compressing the skill premium, as unskilled-labor-intensive sectors such as construction expand faster than skill-intensive services. A multisector small-open-economy model shows how saving or spending commodity windfalls can reinforce or moderate this decline in inequality.

We develop a news-based measure of perceived financial stress for Canada using Globe and Mail articles since 1977. We show that news shocks primarily impact unsecured households credit, consistent with household precautionary behavior.

Oil price forecasts help central banks assess risks to inflation and economic activity. Forecasters often rely on the latest price of oil, on futures markets or on economic models. The best approach depends on how far ahead forecasters are looking and whether they need only a forecast or also an explanation of what’s behind it.

The BoC–BoE database of sovereign debt defaults, published and updated annually by the Bank of Canada and the Bank of England, provides comprehensive estimates of stocks of government obligations in default.

Using Canadian firm-level market shares and an oligopolistic model, the paper shows that a 25% counter-tariff on U.S. imports raises Canada's aggregate price index by 0.66%, far below direct cost pass-through predictions due to consumer substitution and markup adjustments.

Prima is the Bank of Canada’s new model for projection and policy analysis. It builds on the economic foundations of earlier Bank models, adding detail on how sectoral pressures affect production costs and their pass-through to consumer prices.

Producer price indexes measure changes in the prices that producers receive for their outputs or that they pay for their inputs. Statistics Canada publishes a range of producer price indexes for specific products and industries. For the first time, these series have been combined into a small set of broad sectoral measures.

This paper examines the direct effects of industrial robot adoption on workers and owners within Canadian private corporations. Adoption increases firm scale and per-worker payroll but does not decrease the labor share of value added. Conventional accounting of labor income earned by owners masks the impact on non-owner workers.

Portfolio-balance models of the yield curve are notoriously hard to estimate. This paper offers a simple, two-step estimation approach that can be implemented with standard term structure estimation methods. In our application to U.S. Treasury data, our method recovers economically interpretable drivers of the yield curve.