Bio

Barbara Sadaba is a Senior Analyst in the International Economic Analysis Department at the Bank of Canada. Her research interests lie in the fields of applied Macroeconomics and Econometrics. She focuses on studying the hidden drivers of asset prices in International Financial Markets using time-series state-space models in both frequentist and Bayesian approaches. Barbara received her PhD in Economics from Erasmus University Rotterdam and the Tinbergen Institute in The Netherlands.


Staff working papers

Macroeconomic Disasters and Consumption Smoothing: International Evidence from Historical Data

Staff Working Paper 2023-4 Lorenzo Pozzi, Barbara Sadaba
Does consumption smoothing fundamentally decrease during macroeconomic disasters? This paper uses a large historical dataset (1870–2016) for 16 industrial economies to show that during macroeconomic disasters (e.g., wars, pandemics, depressions) aggregate consumption and income are significantly less decoupled than during normal times.

Detecting Scapegoat Effects in the Relationship Between Exchange Rates and Macroeconomic Fundamentals

Staff Working Paper 2017-22 Lorenzo Pozzi, Barbara Sadaba
This paper presents a new testing method for the scapegoat model of exchange rates that aims to tighten the link between the theory on scapegoats and its empirical implementation. This new testing method consists of a number of steps.

Assessing the Predictive Ability of Sovereign Default Risk on Exchange Rate Returns

Staff Working Paper 2017-19 Claudia Foroni, Francesco Ravazzolo, Barbara Sadaba
Increased sovereign credit risk is often associated with sharp currency movements. Therefore, expectations of the probability of a sovereign default event can convey important information regarding future movements of exchange rates.

See More


Journal publications

Refereed journals

  • “Assessing the predictive ability of sovereign default risk on exchange rate returns”.
    (with C. Foroni, and F. Ravazzolo). Journal of International Money and Finance, 2018, 81: 242-264.
  • “Detecting scapegoat effects in the relationship between exchange rates and macroeconomic fundamentals: a new approach”. (with L. Pozzi). Macroeconomic Dynamics, 2018, 1-44.