E0 - General
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Overlooking the online world: Does mismeasurement of the digital economy explain the productivity slowdown?
Since the mid-2000s, labour productivity has slowed down in Canada despite enormous technological advances that were expected to improve it. This note investigates whether mismeasurement of the digital economy can explain this paradox. -
Potential output in Canada: 2020 reassessment
After COVID-19, we expect potential output growth to stabilize around 1.2 percent. This is lower than the 2010–18 average growth of 1.8 percent. Relative to the April 2019 reassessment, the growth profile is revised down. Given the unknown course of the pandemic, uncertainty around these estimates is higher than in previous years. -
Potential Output in Canada: 2019 Reassessment
Potential output is expected to grow on average at 1.8 per cent over 2019–21 and at 1.9 per cent in 2022. While the contribution of trend labour input to potential output growth is expected to decrease between 2019 and 2022, the contribution of trend labour productivity is projected to increase. -
Canada’s Monetary Policy Report: If Text Could Speak, What Would It Say?
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. -
GDP by Industry in Real Time: Are Revisions Well Behaved?
The monthly data for real gross domestic product (GDP) by industry are used extensively in real time both to ground the Bank of Canada’s monitoring of economic activity and in the Bank’s nowcasting tools, making these data one of the most important high-frequency time series for Canadian nowcasting. -
An Alternative Estimate of Canadian Potential Output: The Multivariate State-Space Framework
In this paper, we extend the state-space methodology proposed by Blagrave et al. (2015) and decompose Canadian potential output into trend labour productivity and trend labour input. As in Blagrave et al. (2015), we include output growth and inflation expectations from consensus forecasts to help refine our estimates. -
The Framework for Risk Identification and Assessment
Risk assessment models are an important component of the Bank’s analytical tool kit for assessing the resilience of the financial system. We describe the Framework for Risk Identification and Assessment (FRIDA), a suite of models developed at the Bank of Canada to quantify the impact of financial stability risks to the broader economy and a range of financial system participants (households, businesses and banks). -
Monetary Policy Uncertainty: A Tale of Two Tails
We document a strong asymmetry in the evolution of federal funds rate expectations and map this observed asymmetry into measures of monetary policy uncertainty. We show that periods of monetary policy tightening and easing are distinctly related to downside (policy rate is higher than expected) and upside (policy rate is lower than expected) uncertainty. -
Noisy Monetary Policy
We introduce limited information in monetary policy. Agents receive signals from the central bank revealing new information (“news") about the future evolution of the policy rate before changes in the rate actually take place. However, the signal is disturbed by noise.