In this note, we provide a brief outline of the recent developments in wage measures in Canada. We then assess whether wage growth is consistent with its fundamentals.
The article examines the extent of downward nominal wage rigidity in Canada and its implications for monetary policy. The authors ask whether its existence is a sufficient argument for a higher inflation target if concerns about the effective lower bound are adequately addressed.
Shocks to a currency area can and often do have asymmetric impacts on its regions that, in the absence of perfect labour mobility, lead to gaps in relative labour market performance. Witness, for example, the effects of the 2008/09 recession and subsequent financial crisis in Europe on the dispersion of employment rates across the euro area – and to a lesser extent the United States.
We develop a model to analyze the link between financial leverage, worker pay structure and the risk of job termination. Contrary to the conventional view, we show that even in the absence of any agency problem among workers, variable pay can be optimal despite workers being risk averse and firms risk neutral.
Average hourly real wage series from the Labor Productivity and Costs (LPC) program and the Current Employment Statistics (CES) program have evolved very differently over the past decades.
Calculating the labour market indicator (LMI) at the provincial level provides useful insights into Canada’s regional economies and reveals differing trends in the state of underlying labour market conditions across provinces. Conclusions based on the Canadian LMI do not necessarily translate to the provinces. In most cases, the correlations between the provincial LMIs and the underlying labour market variables have the expected sign.
In this analytical note, we provide a comprehensive assessment of the complex structural adjustment facing the Canadian economy following the commodity price decline since mid-2014. We quantify separately the impacts coming from the commodity sector restructuring and the broader effect of significantly lower terms of trade.
We estimate the link between exchange rate fluctuations and the labour input of Canadian manufacturing industries. The analysis is based on a dynamic model of labour demand, and the econometric strategy employs a panel two-step approach for cointegrating regressions.
The Bank of Canada recently launched a quarterly survey to measure the expectations of Canadian households: the Canadian Survey of Consumer Expectations (CSCE). The data collected provide comprehensive information about consumer expectations for and uncertainty about inflation, the labour market and household finance. This article describes the CSCE and illustrates its potential to offer rich information about Canadian consumers for researchers and policy-makers.
This paper considers a real business cycle model with labor search frictions where two types of incentive pay are explicitly introduced following the insights from the micro literature on performance pay (e.g. Lazear, 1986).