Staff research

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.

This paper discusses three long-term forces that are acting on the global economy and their implications for companies and policy-makers.

I use firm-product-level data for Canadian online retailers to study how product scope (the average number of product categories per firm) evolved from 1999 to 2012. During this period, product scope dropped monotonically from 59 to 5 product categories.

Until recently, few efforts have been made to systematically measure and aggregate the nominal value of the different types of sovereign government debt in default. To help fill this gap, the Bank of Canada (BoC) developed a comprehensive database of sovereign defaults that is posted on its website and updated in partnership with the Bank of England (BoE).

We use rich microdata to measure home equity extraction in Canada and track its evolution over time. We find home equity extraction has been rising in recent years and has likely contributed materially to dynamics in household spending.

This paper presents a structural framework of the global oil market that relies on information on global fuel consumption to identify flow demand for oil. We show that under mild identifying assumptions, data on global fuel consumption help to provide comparatively sharp insights on elasticities and other key structural parameters of the global oil market.