Bio

Shaofeng Xu is a Senior Economist in the Monetary Policy and Financial Studies Division of the Canadian Economic Analysis Department. His research interests include macroeconomics, financial economics, and housing economics. Shaofeng holds a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of California at Davis. He has an M.S. in Mathematics and a B.S. in Statistics.


Staff working papers

Model Uncertainty and Wealth Distribution

Staff Working Paper 2019-48 Edouard Djeutem, Shaofeng Xu
This paper studies the implications of model uncertainty for wealth distribution in a tractable general equilibrium model with a borrowing constraint and robustness à la Hansen and Sargent (2008). Households confront model uncertainty about the process driving the return of the risky asset, and they choose robust policies.

The Role of Corporate Saving over the Business Cycle: Shock Absorber or Amplifier?

Staff Working Paper 2018-59 Xiaodan Gao, Shaofeng Xu
We document countercyclical corporate saving behavior with the degree of countercyclicality varying nonmonotonically with firm size. We then develop a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model with heterogeneous firms to explain the pattern and study its implications for business cycles.

Interpreting Volatility Shocks as Preference Shocks

Staff Working Paper 2016-45 Shaofeng Xu
This paper examines the relationship between volatility shocks and preference shocks in an analytically tractable endogenous growth model with recursive preferences and stochastic volatility. I show that there exists an explicit mapping between volatility shocks and preference shocks, and a rise in volatility generates the same impulse responses of macroeconomic aggregates as a negative preference shock.

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Journal publications

Refereed journals