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The neutral nominal policy rate serves as a benchmark for assessing the degree of monetary stimulus and provides a medium- to long-run anchor for the policy rate. Since quantitative measures of the neutral rate are subject to considerable uncertainty, Bank staff rely on four different approaches to estimate the Canadian neutral rate.

We study the labour market and welfare effects of expanding unemployment insurance benefits and introducing payroll subsidies during the COVID-19 pandemic. We find that both policies are complementary and are beneficial to different types of workers. Payroll subsidies preserve the employment of workers in highly productive jobs, while unemployment insurance replaces lost income for workers who experience inevitable job loss.

We decompose total variance into its bad and good components and measure the premia associated with their fluctuations using stock and option data from a large cross-section of firms.

How should a central bank conduct quantitative easing (QE) in a monetary union when regions differ in their size and portfolio characteristics? Optimal QE policy suggests allocating greater purchases from the region that faces stronger portfolio frictions, and not necessarily according to each region’s size.

How much attention do firms pay to macroeconomic news? Through a novel text-based measure, two facts emerge. First, attention is polarized. Most firms either never or always pay attention to economic conditions. Second, it is countercyclical. During recessions, more firms pay attention, and firms pay greater attention to macroeconomic news.

We analyze 40 years’ worth of natural disasters using a local projection framework to assess their impact on provincial labour markets in Canada. We find that disasters decrease hours worked within a week and lower wage growth in the medium run. Our study highlights that disasters affect vulnerable workers through the income channel.

Using a novel dynamic portfolio balance model of the yield curve for Government of Canada bonds, I find that the Bank of Canada’s Government of Canada Bond Purchase Program reduced Canadian 10-year and 5-year zero-coupon yields by 84 and 52 basis points, respectively.

Existing literature documents that house prices respond to monetary policy surprises with a significant delay, taking years to reach their peak response. We present new evidence of a much faster response.

In a simple two-sector New Keynesian model, sticky prices generate a counterfactual negative comovement between the output of durable and nondurable goods following a monetary policy shock. We show that heterogeneous factor markets allow any combination of strictly positive price stickiness to generate positive output comovement.