Browse research

We develop a model to analyze the link between financial leverage, worker pay structure and the risk of job termination. Contrary to the conventional view, we show that even in the absence of any agency problem among workers, variable pay can be optimal despite workers being risk averse and firms risk neutral.

This is the first of the Financial Markets Department’s descriptions of Canadian financial industrial organization. The document discusses the organization of the repurchase-agreement (repo) market in Canada.

Merchants who accept credit cards face payment processing fees. In most countries, the no-surcharge rule prohibits them from using surcharges to pass these fees on to customers.

Average hourly real wage series from the Labor Productivity and Costs (LPC) program and the Current Employment Statistics (CES) program have evolved very differently over the past decades.

Calculating the labour market indicator (LMI) at the provincial level provides useful insights into Canada’s regional economies and reveals differing trends in the state of underlying labour market conditions across provinces. Conclusions based on the Canadian LMI do not necessarily translate to the provinces. In most cases, the correlations between the provincial LMIs and the underlying labour market variables have the expected sign.

In this analytical note, we provide a comprehensive assessment of the complex structural adjustment facing the Canadian economy following the commodity price decline since mid-2014. We quantify separately the impacts coming from the commodity sector restructuring and the broader effect of significantly lower terms of trade.

We estimate the link between exchange rate fluctuations and the labour input of Canadian manufacturing industries. The analysis is based on a dynamic model of labour demand, and the econometric strategy employs a panel two-step approach for cointegrating regressions.

The Bank of Canada recently launched a quarterly survey to measure the expectations of Canadian households: the Canadian Survey of Consumer Expectations (CSCE). The data collected provide comprehensive information about consumer expectations for and uncertainty about inflation, the labour market and household finance. This article describes the CSCE and illustrates its potential to offer rich information about Canadian consumers for researchers and policy-makers.

Recently released data show downward trends for both the firm entry rate and the rate of new entrepreneurship since the early 1980s in Canada. This paper documents these trends and discusses potential explanations.

This paper considers a real business cycle model with labor search frictions where two types of incentive pay are explicitly introduced following the insights from the micro literature on performance pay (e.g. Lazear, 1986).