Firm dynamics
-
-
An Anatomy of Firms’ Political Speech
We study the distribution of political speech across U.S. firms. We develop a measure of political engagement based on firms’ communications (earning calls, regulatory filings, and social media) by training a large language model to identify statements that contain political opinions. Using these data, we document five facts about firms’ political engagement. -
Markups and Inflation in Oligopolistic Markets: Evidence from Wholesale Price Data
We study how the interaction of market power and nominal price rigidity influences inflation dynamics. We find that pass-through declines with price stickiness when markets are concentrated, which implies a lower slope of the New Keynesian Phillips curve. -
Survey of Indigenous Firms: A Snapshot of Wages, Prices and Financing in the Indigenous Business Sector in Canada
What sources of financing do Indigenous-owned businesses in Canada use, and what are their expectations about prices, wages and inflation? We find Indigenous-owned firms are significantly less reliant on financial institutions as sources of financing compared with non-Indigenous firms. We also find Indigenous-owned firms have higher inflation expectations and weaker wage-growth expectations. -
Pricing behaviour and inflation during the COVID-19 pandemic: Insights from consumer prices microdata
Using the microdata underlying the Canadian consumer price index, we study how often and by how much firms changed their prices during the COVID-19 pandemic. We find that the surge in inflation was mainly associated with retailers raising prices much more often than before. We also find that more recently, corporate price-setting behaviour appears to be approaching pre-pandemic norms. -
November 9, 2023
Getting used to higher interest rates
Senior Deputy Governor Carolyn Rogers talks about why interest rates could settle at a higher level than Canadians are used to and why preparing early for that possible outcome is important. -
November 9, 2023
Financial stability in a world of higher interest rates
Senior Deputy Governor Carolyn Rogers talks about financial stability in an era of higher interest rates. -
Identifying Nascent High-Growth Firms Using Machine Learning
Firms that grow rapidly have the potential to usher in new innovations, products or processes (Kogan et al. 2017), become superstar firms (Haltiwanger et al. 2013) and impact the aggregate labour share (Autor et al. 2020; De Loecker et al. 2020). We explore the use of supervised machine learning techniques to identify a population of nascent high-growth firms using Canadian administrative firm-level data. -
October 3, 2023
How price setting influences inflation
Deputy Governor Nicolas Vincent talks about how companies set their prices, how those practices changed during the pandemic and why this remains a risk for inflation. -
October 3, 2023
Understanding the unusual: How firms set prices during periods of high inflation
Deputy Governor Nicolas Vincent discusses how firms set their prices and how pricing behaviour changed in our recent environment of high inflation.