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This note analyzes the evolution of the narrative in the Bank of Canada’s Monetary Policy Report (MPR). It presents descriptive statistics on the core text, including length, most frequently used words and readability level—the three Ls. Although each Governor of the Bank of Canada focuses on the macroeconomic events of the day and the mandate of inflation targeting, we observe that the language used in the MPR varies somewhat from one Governor’s tenure to the next.

We introduce a new class of time-varying parameter vector autoregressions (TVP-VARs) where the identified structural innovations are allowed to influence — contemporaneously and with a lag — the dynamics of the intercept and autoregressive coefficients in these models.

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.

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.

Markets for securitized assets were characterized by high liquidity prior to the recent financial crisis and by a sudden market dry-up at the onset of the crisis. A general equilibrium model with heterogeneous investment opportunities and information frictions predicts that, in boom periods or mild recessions, the degree of adverse selection in resale markets for securitized assets is limited because of the reputation-based guarantees by asset originators.

When players repeatedly face an identical or similar game (e.g., coordination game, technology adoption game, or product choice game), they may learn through experience to perform better in the future. This learning behaviour has important economic implications.

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.

I develop a method for Bayesian estimation of globally solved, non-linear macroeconomic models. The method uses a mixture density network to approximate the initial state distribution. The mixture density network results in more reliable posterior inference compared with the case when the initial states are set to their steady-state values.

Assets in tax-deferred retirement accounts (TDA) and housing are two major components of household portfolios. In this paper, we develop a life-cycle model to examine the interaction between households’ use of TDA and their housing decisions.

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.