Staff research

Previous research suggests that lower-income Canadians may have unique experiences with the use of payments, including the use of cash and digital payments. We conduct a case study using data from [the Canadian Financial Diaries project/Canadian financial diaries] to gain insight into how some lower-income Canadians pay.

This note examines how monetary policy responses to shelter inflation affect both the overall economy and different households. We find that the aggregate macroeconomic effects of responding to shelter inflation are modest, whereas the redistributive consequences across households are substantially larger.

This note reviews the emerging evidence on AI’s labour-market and productivity effects, highlighting early task-level impacts, sizable micro level productivity gains, and the macroeconomic challenges these pose for monetary policy during the transition.

In markets with costly buyer entry, information transparency about prices draws in buyers, increasing demand-side competition and putting upward pressure on prices. We show that this buyer entry effect may dominate seller competition as emphasized by conventional wisdom and prices and markups may rise with information transparency.

The current monetary policy framework of the Fed intends to be more ’inclusive’ by running the economy hot for longer during expansions.

We study household mortgage choice in a model with three mortgage contracts that differ in their payment structures: fixed-rate fixed-payment, variable-rate variable-payment, and a hybrid variable-rate fixed-payment mortgage where interest rate changes affect principal repayment rather than payment size. We calibrate the model to match mortgage choice patterns in Canada, where all these options are offered with short terms. We demonstrate that restricting contract choice or mandating long terms, as in the U.S. system, can lead to substantial welfare losses by limiting risk management strategies and increasing mortgage pricing ex-ante.

Canadians usually pay their mortgages on time. But some fall behind on mortgage payments. Before they do, homeowners often increase their use of credit cards and lines of credit, and then fall behind on those payments.

Analyzing TransUnion data from 2015–2024, this study identifies a systematic timeline of distress where rising credit utilization and non-mortgage arrears precede mortgage delinquency by up to two years. This deterioration intensifies in the final six months, providing a robust suite of high-frequency indicators for monitoring emerging household stress.

Canada and the United States have both benefited from decades of free trade. But US tariffs significantly changed this relationship, and Canadians reacted. In our research, we explore the Buy Canadian sentiment one year after it emerged and measure how much it has shifted travel patterns and spending in grocery stores.

We use Canadian data to examine how monetary policy affects house prices and the consumer price index for rent through exogenous changes in the mortgage interest rates. It finds that the price and rent impacts operate through various channels and that these impacts vary by region.