Staff research

Is obscuring prices always bad for consumers? The answer depends on the market structure and on the negotiating power between manufacturers and retailers.

We assess the impact of COVID-19 on consumption indicators by estimating the effects of government-mandated containment measures and of the willingness of individuals to voluntarily physically distance to prevent contagion.

Consumption inequality and a low interest rate environment are two important trends in today’s economy. But the implications they may have—and how those implications interact—within different monetary policy frameworks are not well understood. We study the ranking of alternative frameworks that take these trends into account.

Central banks in many advanced economies enjoy a high degree of independence, which protects monetary policy decisions from political influence. But how should independent central banks react if pressured by fiscal policy-makers? We examine whether a central bank should design a monetary policy framework that prescribes acting conditionally on how fiscal policy behaves.

We demonstrate the usefulness of payment systems data and machine learning models for macroeconomic predictions and provide a set of econometric tools to overcome associated challenges.

We create a theoretical model of central bank asset purchases. The model helps explain how, in a crisis, these purchases ease pressures on investment dealers.

Consumers often express concerns about lack of privacy, but they still give up a lot of data to digital platforms. This paper builds a dynamic game-theoretic model of data collection and privacy protection, which potentially explains consumers’ behaviour.

Globalization is in retreat, yet digitalization is on the rise. How will these trends impact inflation?

We introduce bounded rationality in a canonical New Keynesian model calibrated to match Canadian macroeconomic data since Canada’s adoption of inflation targeting. We use the model to quantitatively assess the macroeconomic impact of alternative monetary policy regimes.

We study how different types of monetary policy shape the distributional effects of external economic shocks on households’ consumption in a small open economy. Our results present a trade-off between maintaining overall stabilization and controlling consumption inequality.