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The Bank of Canada has a mandate to “promote the economic and financial welfare of Canada,” primarily through the conduct of monetary policy and promotion of a safe, sound and efficient financial system. Understanding the macroeconomic and financial system impacts of climate change and the transition to a low-carbon economy is therefore a priority for the Bank.

We consider structural vector autoregressions that are identified through stochastic volatility. Our analysis focuses on whether a particular structural shock can be identified through heteroskedasticity without imposing any sign or exclusion restrictions.

In the year and a half leading up to mid-2003, both employment and labour force participation increased at an unusually rapid pace compared to domestic economic activity. Gains in employment were unusually large, relative to output growth, compared to gains in total hours worked. This is explained by a faster rate of increase in the participation rate of the 55 and older age group, many of whom opted for part-time employment. This shift in the composition of employment contributed to a reduction in the length of the average workweek in 2002. As a result, labour input progressed at a rate that was markedly slower than for employment and more in line with its historical relationship to output growth. The authors anticipate that the 55 and older age group will continue to participate strongly in the labour force, but that as the economy rebounds and uncertainty diminishes, the cyclical component in the growth of part-time work should diminish and that of full-time employment increase. Employment growth should moderate in relation to output growth and there may be a cyclical rebound in labour productivity as total hours worked increases during the initial recovery in output growth.

Models with default options are hard to solve. We propose an extension of the endogenous grid method that solves default risk models more efficiently and accurately.

Firms that grow rapidly have the potential to usher in new innovations, products or processes (Kogan et al. 2017), become superstar firms (Haltiwanger et al. 2013) and impact the aggregate labour share (Autor et al. 2020; De Loecker et al. 2020). We explore the use of supervised machine learning techniques to identify a population of nascent high-growth firms using Canadian administrative firm-level data.

Cash use is declining while contactless and mobile payments are on the rise.

We show how participants in Canada’s new high-value payment system save liquidity by exploiting the new gridlock resolution arrangement. The findings have important implications for the design of these systems and shed light on financial institutions’ liquidity preference.

In this paper, we extend the state-space methodology proposed by Blagrave et al. (2015) and decompose Canadian potential output into trend labour productivity and trend labour input. As in Blagrave et al. (2015), we include output growth and inflation expectations from consensus forecasts to help refine our estimates.

The liquidity management strategies of fund managers, supported by policy measures, have helped bond funds limit the increase in redemptions caused by COVID 19. This avoided further deterioration in liquidity in bond markets. Nevertheless, these funds were left with lower cash buffers, which could make them more vulnerable to additional large redemptions.

We show how Canadian mortgage debt dynamics can be modelled in a semi-structural macroeconomic model, such as the Bank of Canada’s LENS. The model we propose accounts for Canada’s unique mortgage debt structure.