E - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics
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It takes a panel to predict the future: What the stock market says about future economic growth in Canada
Valuation ratios in the Canadian stock market can help reveal investors’ expectations about future economic growth because the impact of economic growth on valuation ratios can vary across industries. We find that this variation helps produce accurate forecasts of future growth of real gross domestic product in Canada. The forecasts from our model declined by just over 3 percentage points between January 2022 and February 2023—a period when the Bank of Canada rapidly increased the overnight rate. As well, we find that interest-rate-sensitive industries had an outsized contribution to this expected slowdown in growth. -
Cryptoasset Ownership and Use in Canada: An Update for 2022
We find that Bitcoin ownership declined from 13% in 2021 to 10% in 2022. This drop occurred against a background of steep price declines and an increasingly tight regulatory atmosphere. -
Global Demand and Supply Sentiment: Evidence from Earnings Calls
This paper quantifies global demand, supply and uncertainty shocks and compares two major global recessions: the 2008–09 Great Recession and the COVID-19 pandemic. We use two alternate approaches to decompose economic shocks: text mining techniques on earnings calls transcripts and a structural Bayesian vector autoregression model. -
What Can Earnings Calls Tell Us About the Output Gap and Inflation in Canada?
We construct new indicators of demand and supply for the Canadian economy by using natural language processing techniques to analyze earnings calls of publicly listed firms. Our results indicate that the new indicators could help central banks identify inflationary pressures in real time. -
Why Consumers Disagree About Future Inflation
Since 2022, consumer inflation expectations have shifted, with a significant increase in those expecting high inflation in the coming year and a surge in those expecting deflation further in the future. Using data from the Canadian Survey of Consumer Expectations, this paper seeks to assess the factors that influence people to expect high inflation, moderate inflation or deflation. -
Markups and inflation during the COVID-19 pandemic
We find that prices and costs for consumer-oriented firms moved roughly one-for-one during the COVID-19 pandemic. This means firms fully passed rising costs through to the prices they charged. However, our results are suggestive, given data limitations and the uncertainty associated with estimating markups. -
What People Believe About Monetary Finance and What We Can(’t) Do About It: Evidence from a Large-Scale, Multi-Country Survey Experiment
We conduct a large-scale survey to shed light on what people believe about public finance. An experiment demonstrates that central bank communication can persistently shift views on monetary financing. It further suggests that views on monetary financing impact support for fiscal discipline. -
Monetary Policy Transmission, Bank Market Power, and Wholesale Funding Reliance
I study how banking market concentration and reliance on wholesale funding affect monetary policy transmission to mortgage rates. I find that this transmission is imperfect and dampens the response of consumption, output, and housing prices. -
Privacy-Preserving Post-Quantum Credentials for Digital Payments
Digital payments and decentralized systems enable the creation of new financial products and services for users. One core challenge in digital payments is the need to protect users from fraud and abuse while retaining privacy in individual transactions. We propose a pseudonymous credential scheme for use in payment systems to tackle this problem.