Browse research

We study the causal effect of mortgage rate changes on consumer spending, debt repayment and defaults during an expansionary and a contractionary monetary policy episode in Canada. We find asymmetric responses of consumer durable spending, deleveraging and defaults. These findings help us to understand household sector response to interest rate changes.

We introduce a new class of time-varying parameter vector autoregressions (TVP-VARs) where the identified structural innovations are allowed to influence — contemporaneously and with a lag — the dynamics of the intercept and autoregressive coefficients in these models.

Standard theories of price adjustment are based on the problem of a single-product firm, and therefore they may not be well suited to analyze price dynamics in the economy with multiproduct firms.

We consider the effects of protectionist trade policies on international and domestic market integration, using evidence from the long-standing softwood lumber trade dispute between Canada and the United States.

We quantify the reaction of U.S. equity, bond futures, and exchange rate returns to oil price shocks driven by oil inventory news.

We present the structure and features of the International Model for Projecting Activity (IMPACT), a global semi-structural model used to conduct projections and policy analysis at the Bank of Canada. Major blocks of the model are developed based on the rational error correction framework of Kozicki and Tinsley (1999), which allows the model to strike a balance between theoretical structure and empirical performance.

We measure the prevalence of zombie firms in Canada and assess how they could potentially affect the financial system.

Real growth in gross domestic product tends to be meaningfully higher when a large share of industries and demand components are growing—that is, when growth is broad across many fronts.

This research develops a model in which the economy is directly influenced by how pessimistic or optimistic economic agents are about the future. The agents may hold different views and update them as new economic data become available.

We illustrate how market data can be informative about the interactions between monetary and fiscal policy. Federal funds futures are private contracts that reflect investor’s expectations about monetary policy decisions.