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We document a substantial positive correlation of employment status between mothers and their children in the United States, linking data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 (NLSY79) and the NLSY79 Children and Young Adults. After controlling for ability, education and wealth, a one-year increase in a mother’s employment is associated with six weeks more employment of her child on average.

Deputy Governor Timothy Lane discusses the changing nature of international trade and the factors that are propelling it.

This paper examines the experience of Sweden with government notes and private bank notes to determine how well the Swedish experience corresponds to that of Canada and the United States. Sweden is important to study because it has had government notes in circulation for more than 350 years, and it had government notes before private bank notes.

A well-functioning monetary system is characterized by public and private forms of money that exchange at par as value flows freely between them. A relevant retail public money—whether in the form of cash, a central bank digital currency or both—is a necessary component of such a monetary system.

We present two models for long-term inflation expectations and inflation risk premiums for Canada.

This paper proposes a theory of foreign reserves as macroprudential policy. We study an open-economy model of financial crises in which pecuniary externalities lead to overborrowing, and show that by accumulating international reserves, the government can achieve the constrained-efficient allocation.

Macroeconomic projections and risk analyses play an important role in guiding monetary policy decisions. Models are integral to this process. This paper discusses how the Bank of Canada brings research models and lessons learned from those models into the central bank projection environment.

There has been tremendous discussion of Bitcoin, digital currencies and FinTech. However, there is limited empirical evidence of Bitcoin’s adoption and usage. We propose a methodology to collect a nationally representative sample using the Bitcoin Omnibus Survey (BTCOS) to track the ubiquity and usage of Bitcoin in Canada.

We investigate the extent to which excess supply (demand) in labour markets contributes to a lower (higher) growth rate of average nominal wages for workers. Using panel methods on data from 10 advanced economies for 1992–2018, we produce reduced-form estimates of a wage Phillips curve specification that is consistent with a New Keynesian framework.

Financing costs are important for both firms and the economy, affecting investment decisions and, ultimately, economic growth. Despite concern among policy-makers that the cost of equity financing may be higher in Canada than in the United States, empirical evidence supporting this view is mixed. Yet Canadian firms may not undertake as many projects that could potentially enhance growth if the cost of equity financing in Canada is relatively high. The article summarizes research by Jonathan Witmer and Lorie Zorn on the influences on the cost of equity in Canada and the United States, using an updated methodology that controls for firm characteristics and aggregate-level factors. In their sample, the cost of equity was 30–50 basis points higher in Canada over 1988 to 2006 but appears to have dropped in the post-1997 period. The results have policy implications related to such factors as firm size, disclosure, and securities regulation and enforcement.