C - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods
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Household indebtedness risks in the wake of COVID‑19
COVID-19 presents challenges for indebted households. We assess these by drawing parallels between pandemics and natural disasters. Taking into account the financial health of the household sector when the pandemic began, we run model simulations to illustrate how payment deferrals and the labour market recovery will affect mortgage defaults. -
Canadian Financial Stress and Macroeconomic Conditions
Severe disruptions in the financial markets, as observed during the 2008 global financial crisis or the COVID-19 pandemic, can impair the stability of the entire financial system and worsen macroeconomic downturns. -
Scenario Analysis and the Economic and Financial Risks from Climate Change
This paper adapts climate-economy models that have been applied in other contexts for use in climate-related scenario analysis. We consider illustrative scenarios for the global economy that could generate economic and financial risks. Our results suggest there are significant economic risks from climate change and the move to a low-carbon economy. -
Endogenous Time Variation in Vector Autoregressions
We introduce a new class of time-varying parameter vector autoregressions (TVP-VARs) where the identified structural innovations are allowed to influence — contemporaneously and with a lag — the dynamics of the intercept and autoregressive coefficients in these models. -
Demand for Payment Services and Consumer Welfare: The Introduction of a Central Bank Digital Currency
Using a two-stage model, we study the determinants of Canadian consumers’ choices of payment method at the point of sale. We estimate consumer preferences and adoption costs for various combinations of payment methods. We analyze how introducing a central bank digital currency would affect the market equilibrium. -
IMPACT: The Bank of Canada’s International Model for Projecting Activity
We present the structure and features of the International Model for Projecting Activity (IMPACT), a global semi-structural model used to conduct projections and policy analysis at the Bank of Canada. Major blocks of the model are developed based on the rational error correction framework of Kozicki and Tinsley (1999), which allows the model to strike a balance between theoretical structure and empirical performance. -
Identifying Consumer-Welfare Changes when Online Search Platforms Change Their List of Search Results
Online shopping is often guided by search platforms. Consumers type keywords into query boxes, and search platforms deliver a list of products. Consumers' attention is limited, and exhaustive searches are often impractical. -
Social Learning and Monetary Policy at the Effective Lower Bound
This research develops a model in which the economy is directly influenced by how pessimistic or optimistic economic agents are about the future. The agents may hold different views and update them as new economic data become available. -
Technology Adoption in Input-Output Networks
We study how input-output networks affect the speed of technology adoption. In particular, we model the decision to adopt the programming language Python 3 by software packages. Python 3 provides advanced features but is not backward compatible with Python 2, which implies it comes with adoption costs.