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I use firm-product-level data for Canadian online retailers to study how product scope (the average number of product categories per firm) evolved from 1999 to 2012. During this period, product scope dropped monotonically from 59 to 5 product categories.

Occupations held by females with mid-level education face the highest risk of accelerated automation as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.

We measure systemic risk in the network of financial market infrastructures (FMIs) as the probability that two or more FMIs have a large credit risk exposure to the same FMI participant.

The resurgence of sizable current account imbalances in the major economies in recent years, particularly the tripling of the U.S. deficit, has led to renewed academic and public discussions about their sustainability. Jacob's main objective is to show that current account balances are simply the outcome of various relative structural and cyclical forces between trading partners. He reviews the factors behind the changes in the current account positions of the three largest industrial economies (the United States, Japan, and the euro area). Two strong determinants shaping the current account balances are the faster increase in U.S. productivity compared with that of other major economies and, more recently, the loosening in the U.S. fiscal stance. Jacob also reviews a range of outside assessments from such sources as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development and the International Monetary Fund, as well as the academic literature, to determine the possible risks to macroeconomic and financial stability.

We explore the long-run effects of a monetary policy shock in a Heterogeneous Agent New Keynesian model built on the micro evidence that job losses lead to persistently lower individual earnings through a combination of skill decay and abandonment of the labour force.

Gosselin examines and reports on the various factors that contribute to successful inflation targeting. Using a panel of 21 inflation-targeting countries over the period 1990Q1-2007Q2, Gosselin finds that the ability of central banks to hit their targets varies considerably. Some of these differences can be explained by exchange rate fluctuations, fiscal deficits, and differences in financial development. Others are explained by differences in the targeting framework itself and the manner in which it is implemented.

Donald Gow had a great interest in public administration and in budgetary reform in the federal government.1 He was one in a long line of Queen's professors who have focused on various budgetary matters at the federal level.

This article provides a broad perspective on the performance of the labour market in Canada and the United States since the Great Recession. It also presents a simple way to summarize much of this information in a single composite labour market indicator (LMI) for both countries. The LMI suggests that the unemployment rate in Canada has evolved largely in line with overall labour market conditions since the recession, but may have modestly overstated the extent of recent improvement. The U.S. unemployment rate, in contrast, appears to have substantially overstated the post-recession improvement in labour market conditions.

We estimate a panel error correction model for loan loss provisions, using unique supervisory data on flow of funds into and out of the allowance for loan losses of 25 Dutch banks in the post-2008 crisis period. We find that these banks aim for an allowance of 49% of impaired loans.