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Data show that income inequality in Canada increased substantially during the 1980s and first half of the 1990s but has been relatively stable over the past 25 years. This increase was felt mainly by low-income earners and younger people, while older people benefited from higher retirement income.

In recent years, significant efforts have been made to attract more women into academia and to support their careers, with the goal of increasing their representation.

This report provides a detailed technical description of the updated MacroFinancial Risk Assessment Framework (MFRAF), which replaces the version described in Gauthier, Souissi and Liu (2014) as the Bank of Canada’s stress-testing model for banks with a focus on domestic systemically important banks (D-SIBs).

We explore properties of asymmetric generalized autoregressive conditional heteroscedasticity (GARCH) models in the threshold GARCH (GTARCH) family and propose a more general Spline-GTARCH model, which captures high-frequency return volatility, low-frequency macroeconomic volatility as well as an asymmetric response to past negative news in both autoregressive conditional heteroscedasticity (ARCH) and GARCH terms.

In this paper, we study the impact of Canada’s adoption of protectionist trade policy in 1879 on Canadian welfare. Under the National Policy the Canadian average weighted tariff increased from 14% to 21%. The conventional view is that this was a distortionary policy that negatively affected Canadian welfare.

This paper quantifies global demand, supply and uncertainty shocks and compares two major global recessions: the 2008–09 Great Recession and the COVID-19 pandemic. We use two alternate approaches to decompose economic shocks: text mining techniques on earnings calls transcripts and a structural Bayesian vector autoregression model.

Following the recent financial crisis, major central banks have introduced several types of unconventional monetary policy measures, including liquidity and credit facilities, asset purchases and forward guidance. To date, these measures appear to have been successful. They restored market functioning, facilitated the transmission of monetary policy and supported economic activity. They have potential costs, however, including challenges related to the greatly expanded balance sheets of central banks and the eventual exit from these measures, as well as the vulnerabilities that can arise from prolonged monetary accommodation.

This paper studies optimal discretionary monetary and fiscal policy when the lower bound on nominal interest rates is occasionally binding in a model with nominal rigidities and long-term government debt. At the lower bound it is optimal for the government to temporarily reduce debt.

Using Canadian matched employer-employee data, we show that working hours of different workers are gross complements in production rather than perfect substitutes, as is typically assumed by macroeconomic models of production.