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This paper documents a systematic pattern of how wages, hours and their relationship vary across firms of different sizes. Using a model with heterogeneous firms and workers, we show how the interplay between wages, hours and firm size affect worker sorting and inequality.

We investigate the macroeconomic impacts of mothballed businesses—those that closed temporarily—on sectoral equilibrium prices after a negative demand shock. Our results suggest that pandemic fiscal support for temporary closures may have eased inflationary pressures.

With increasing levels of household debt in recent years, the number of households that may be vulnerable to a negative economic shock is rising as well. Decisions made by both the debtor and the creditor can contribute to insolvency. This article presents some stylized facts about insolvency in Canada’s household sector and analyzes the role of creditors in insolvencies. The average debt of an individual filing for bankruptcy is more than 1.5 times that of an average Canadian household; bankruptcy filers tend to be unemployed or in low-wage jobs, and are typically renters. The article reports that banks that approve more loans per branch, which is interpreted as less-intensive use of soft information (such as the loan officer’s assessment of the applicant’s character), experience more client bankruptcies. This finding has important policy implications, because financial institutions that do not use soft information risk further deterioration in their lending portfolios.

Business cycles are substantially correlated across countries. Yet most existing models are not able to generate substantial transmission through international trade. We show that the nature of such transmission depends fundamentally on the features determining the responsiveness of labor supply and labor demand to international relative prices.

The Canadian dollar has declined against the US dollar since October 2024, mostly due to rising uncertainty around trade policies. A widening differential in policy interest rates between the two countries has also played a modest role.

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.

When investors redeem their fund shares for cash, fixed-income fund managers can choose whether to draw on their liquid holdings or sell bonds in the secondary market. We analyze the liquidity-management decisions of Canadian corporate bond mutual funds, focusing on the strategies they use to meet investor redemptions.

The Bank of Canada’s current suite of models faces challenges in addressing network effects that integrate household and firm-level heterogeneity and their behaviours. We develop CANVAS, a Canadian behavioural agent-based model to contribute to the Bank’s next-generation modelling effort. CANVAS improves forecasting performance and expands capacity for model-based scenario analysis.

Given that China accounts for about half of global copper consumption, it is reasonable to expect that any significant change in Chinese copper consumption will have an impact on the global market.