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This article describes the major trends in the growth of labour productivity in Canada since the early 1960s and summarizes our current knowledge about the causes of the historical patterns. Particular attention is given to the period since the mid-1990s during which productivity growth has been significantly higher in the United States than in Canada. The author reviews the empirical evidence on the contribution of information and communication technology to the recent difference between Canadian and U.S. rates of productivity growth. Other determinants of a country's productivity performance, such as human capital formation and openness to international trade, are also examined. The article concludes with an assessment of the prospects for an increase in the trend rate of productivity growth in Canada over the coming years.

We summarize the theoretical model of central bank asset purchases developed in Cimon and Walton (2022). The model helps us understand how asset purchases ease pressures on investment dealers to restore market conditions in a crisis.

This paper examines the direct effects of industrial robot adoption on workers and owners within Canadian private corporations. Adoption increases firm scale and per-worker payroll but does not decrease the labor share of value added. Conventional accounting of labor income earned by owners masks the impact on non-owner workers.

We use relative value to measure limits to arbitrage in fixed-income markets. Relative value captures apparent deviations from no-arbitrage relationships. It is simple, intuitive and can be computed model-free for any bond.

We document countercyclical corporate saving behavior with the degree of countercyclicality varying nonmonotonically with firm size. We then develop a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model with heterogeneous firms to explain the pattern and study its implications for business cycles.

Coholder households simultaneously carry high-cost credit card debt and low-yield cash. We study the implications of this behavior for fiscal and monetary policy, finding that coholder households have smaller consumption responses in the short run but larger responses in the long run.

This paper examines the effects of time-varying volatility on welfare. I construct a tractable endogenous growth model with recursive preferences, stochastic volatility, and capital adjustment costs.

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.

The official Chinese labour market indicators have been seen as problematic, given their small cyclical movement and their only-partial capture of the labour force. In our paper, we build a monthly Chinese labour market conditions index (LMCI) using text analytics applied to mainland Chinese-language newspapers over the period from 2003 to 2017.