Available sources of hourly wage data in Canada sometimes send conflicting signals about wage growth. This note thus has two objectives: first, we develop a wage measure—the wage-common—to better capture the (underlying) wage pressures reflecting the common trend across the available data sources. Second, we re-examine the relationship between wage growth and macro drivers (labour market slack and labour productivity).
The Bank of Canada is pleased to announce this year’s recipients of its Scholarship and Work Placement Program for Indigenous students and students with disabilities.
This paper compiles the contemporary view on three major Canadian-led trade policies that have marked Canada’s economic history since Confederation: the National Policy (1879), the Canada–US Agreement on Automotive Products (Auto Pact, 1965) and the Canada–US Free Trade Agreement (FTA, 1989, including its extension to the North American Free Trade Agreement, NAFTA, 1994).
In 2015, TSX Alpha, a Canadian stock exchange, implemented a speed bump for marketable orders and an inverted fee structure as part of a redesign. We find no evidence that this redesign impacted market-wide measures of trading costs or contributed appreciably to segmenting retail order flow away from other Canadian venues with a maker-taker fee structure.
We construct a 23-country panel data set to consider the effect of central bank projections and forward guidance on private-sector forecast disagreement. We find that central bank projections and forward guidance matter mainly for private-sector forecast disagreement surrounding upcoming policy rate decisions and matter less for private-sector macroeconomic forecasts.
Business sentiment in the winter Business Outlook Survey remains positive: the sales outlook is still healthy, despite some moderation. At the same time, capacity and labour pressures are becoming more apparent and are stimulating firms’ employment and investment plans.
Survey results suggest that overall business-lending conditions eased slightly in the fourth quarter. This marks the first time that lending conditions have eased since the oil price shock of 2014.
Recent data show that the use of credit cards in Canada has been increasing, while the use of cash has been declining. At the same time, only two-thirds of small or medium-sized businesses accept credit cards.
Capital-goods imports have become an increasing source of growth for the U.S. economy. To understand this phenomenon, we build a neoclassical growth model with international trade in capital goods in which agents face exogenous paths of total factor and investment-specific productivity measures.