Bio
Russell Barnett was appointed Deputy Managing Director of the Bank’s Financial Stability Department (FSD), effective November 1, 2021. In this capacity, he contributes to the strategic direction and management of the department and oversees the Bank’s analyses and research on issues related to the financial sector in Canada and abroad as well as the assessment of risks to financial system stability and the oversight of systemically important payment clearing and settlement systems.
Prior to this, Mr. Barnett was Deputy Managing Director of the Bank’s Canadian Economic Analysis Department (CEA), where he oversaw the Bank’s analysis of the Canadian economy and its research on monetary policy. He managed the Bank’s conjunctural analysis teams, the production of the staff economic outlook and the model development efforts of the department. He also actively contributed to the Bank’s communication of the Monetary Policy Report by presenting to a variety of audiences. In addition, he conducted analysis and research primarily focused on labour markets, economic forecasting, international trade and monetary policy.
Mr. Barnett began his career at the Department of Finance before joining the Bank in 2005 as an economist in the Canadian Projection and Model Development Division. In this role, he developed the Bank’s modelling framework for estimating trend labour input that is still used in the Bank’s annual reassessment of potential output in Canada. After spending 3 years working at the Office of the Parliamentary Budget Officer as Director, Economic and Fiscal Analysis, he returned to the Bank in December 2011 as the Director of the United States Division in the International Economic Analysis Department. He subsequently became Policy Advisor in the same department and later Research Advisor in the Canadian Economic Analysis Department. In both these roles, he led the respective departments’ contributions to the Bank of Canada’s Monetary Policy Report (MPR) and contributed to several research initiatives including the development of the Bank’s Canadian Effective Exchange Rates.
Born in Ottawa, Ontario, Mr. Barnett holds an M.A. in economics from the University of Victoria.
Staff analytical notes
Staff discussion papers
Assessing the Impact of Demand Shocks on the US Term Premium
During and after the Great Recession of 2008–09, conventional monetary policy in the United States and many other advanced economies was constrained by the effective lower bound (ELB) on nominal interest rates. Several central banks implemented large-scale asset purchase (LSAP) programs, more commonly known as quantitative easing or QE, to provide additional monetary stimulus.A New Measure of the Canadian Effective Exchange Rate
Canada’s international competitiveness has received increasing attention in recent years as exports have fallen short of expectations and Canada has lost market share. This paper asks whether the Bank of Canada’s current effective exchange rate measure, the CERI, is still an accurate measure of Canada’s international competitiveness.Decomposing Movements in U.S. Non-Energy Import Market Shares
Country market shares of U.S. non-energy imports have changed considerably since 2002, with varying volatility across three subperiods: pre-crisis (2002–07), crisis (2007–09) and post-crisis (2009–14). In this paper, we analyze market shares for four main trading partners of the United States (Canada, Mexico, China and Japan).Bank publications
Bank of Canada Review articles
August 15, 2013
Monitoring Short-Term Economic Developments in Foreign Economies
The Bank of Canada uses several short-term forecasting models for the monitoring of key foreign economies - the United States, the euro area, Japan and China. The design of the forecasting models used for each region is influenced by the level of detail required, as well as the timeliness and volatility of data. Forecasts from different models are typically combined to mitigate model uncertainty, and judgment is applied to the model forecasts to incorporate information that is not directly reflected in the most recent indicators.
June 17, 2007
Trend Labour Supply in Canada: Implications of Demographic Shifts and the Increasing Labour Force Attachment of Women
While demographic change has been an ongoing process in Canada, labour market implications of an aging population will become more acute in coming years. This article discusses the anticipated slowing in the growth of trend labour input over the coming decades with the aging of the baby boomers, declining fertility rates, and the stabilization of the labour force attachment of women. As the pool of labour shrinks, employers and governments will be looking for ways to address barriers to continued labour force participation and firms will have a greater incentive to find ways of improving labour productivity.The Economy, Plain and Simple
January 31, 2019
Ever wonder how your wages are determined? You’re not the only one who cares about your wages. At the Bank of Canada, we care about them a lot too.
Making cents of wages
Journal publications
- Parsing Shocks: Real-Time Revisions to Gap and Growth Projections for Canada (with Sharon Kozicki and Christopher Petrinec) – Prepared for the 33rd Annual Economic Policy Conference of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, October 16-17, 2008
- Commodity Prices, Macroeconomic Volatility and Canada's Exchange Rate Regime(with Rhys Mendes and Andrew Rennison) – Prepared for the Bank of Canada’s Workshop on Commodity Price Issues, July 10-11, 2006
- Labour Force Participation Rates Revisited: Cohort and Wealth Effects Take Hold (with Steven James, Tim Sargent and Claude Lavoie) – Department of Finance Working Paper (2007-01)