Coronavirus disease (COVID-19)
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Do hedge funds support liquidity in the Government of Canada bond market?
While Government of Canada bond transactions of hedge funds are typically in the opposite direction to those of other market participants, during the peak period of market turmoil in March 2020, hedge funds sold these bonds, just as other market participants did. This shows that hedge funds can at times contribute to one-sided markets and amplify declines in market liquidity. -
Global Demand and Supply Sentiment: Evidence from Earnings Calls
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. -
SME Failures Under Large Liquidity Shocks: An Application to the COVID-19 Crisis
We study the effects of financial frictions on firm exit when firms face large liquidity shocks. We develop a simple model of firm cost-minimization that introduces a financial friction that limits firms’ borrowing capacity to smooth temporary shocks to liquidity. -
June 8, 2023
Economic progress report: Are we entering a new era of higher interest rates?
Deputy Governor Paul Beaudry discusses the latest interest rate decision and suggests reasons why longer-term interest rates could remain higher than they were before the pandemic. -
June 8, 2023
Adjusting to higher interest rates
Speaking a day after we raised interest rates, Deputy Governor Paul Beaudry talks about what Governing Council considered in its decision. He also suggests reasons why long-term interest rates could remain higher than they were before the COVID-19 pandemic. -
Time Use and Macroeconomic Uncertainty
We estimate the effects of economic uncertainty on time use and discuss its macroeconomic implications. We develop a model to demonstrate that substitution between market and non-market work provides an additional insurance margin to households, weakening precautionary savings and labour supply and lowering aggregate demand, ultimately amplifying the contractionary effects of uncertainty. -
Benchmarks for assessing labour market health: 2023 update
We enhance benchmarks for assessing strength in the Canadian labour market. We find the labour market remains tight despite recent strong increases in labour supply, including among prime-working-age women. We also assess the anticipated easing in labour conditions in a context of high population growth. -
A Review of the Bank of Canada’s Support of Key Financial Markets During the COVID-19 Crisis
The COVID-19 pandemic placed unprecedented strain on the global financial system. We describe how the Bank of Canada responded to the rapidly deteriorating liquidity in core Canadian fixed-income markets. -
Turning Words into Numbers: Measuring News Media Coverage of Shortages
We develop high-frequency, news-based indicators using natural language processing methods to analyze news media texts. Our indicators track both supply (raw, intermediate and final goods) and labour shortages over time. They also provide weekly time-varying topic narratives about various types of shortages.