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The history of Canada's money provides a unique perspective from which to view the growth and development of the Canadian economy and Canada as a nation. Author James Powell traces the evolution of Canadian money form its pre-colonial origins to the present day, highlighting the currency chaos of the colonial period, as well as the effects of two world wars and the Great Depression.

In this paper we study the impact of immigration to the United States on the vote for the Republican Party by analyzing county-level data on election outcomes between 1990 and 2010. Our main contribution is to separate the effect of high-skilled and low-skilled immigrants, by exploiting the different geography and timing of the inflows of these two groups of immigrants.

In our analysis of the US productivity slowdown in the 1970s and 2000s, we find that a significant portion of this deceleration can be attributed to a lack of improvement in allocative efficiency across sectors. Our analysis further identifies increased sector-level volatility as a major contributor to this lack of improvement in allocative efficiency.

The financial system makes an important contribution to the welfare of all Canadians. The ability of households and firms to confidently hold and transfer financial assets is one of the fundamental building blocks of the Canadian economy.

We forecast recessions in Canada using an autoregressive (AR) probit model. The results highlight the short-term predictive power of the US economic activity and suggest that financial indicators are reliable predictors of Canadian recessions. In addition, the suggested model meaningfully improves the ability to forecast Canadian recessions, relative to a variety of probit models proposed in the Canadian literature.

Did supply disruptions and cost pressures play a role in rising inflation in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic? Using data collected from websites of large retailers in multiple sectors and countries, we show that shortages may indicate transitory inflationary pressures.

Models for macroeconomic forecasts do not usually take into account the risk of a crisis—that is, a sudden large decline in gross domestic product (GDP). However, policy-makers worry about such GDP tail risk because of its large social and economic costs.

This paper examines the reliability of survey data on business incomes, valuations, and rates of return, which are key inputs for studies of wealth inequality and entrepreneurial choice.

Using U.S. county-level data from 1990 to 2010, we study the causal impact of immigration on the provision of local public goods. We uncover substantial heterogeneity across immigrants with different skills and immigrants of different generations, which leads to unequal fiscal effects across U.S. counties.

This paper explores how the Canadian futures market contributed to banks’ systemic risk during the 2008 financial crisis. It finds that core banks as a whole traded against the periphery, in this way increasing their risk of simultaneous losses.