Browse research

We assess the complex macroeconomic implications of Canada’s recent population increases. We find that newcomers significantly boost the non-inflationary, potential growth of the economy, but existing imbalances in the housing sector may be exacerbated. Greater housing supply is needed to complement the long-term economic benefits of population growth.

Using U.S. county-level data from 1990 to 2010, we study the causal impact of immigration on the provision of local public goods. We uncover substantial heterogeneity across immigrants with different skills and immigrants of different generations, which leads to unequal fiscal effects across U.S. counties.

This paper outlines and assesses the various channels through which digitalization can affect prices of goods and services.

We investigate alternative student debt contracts that defer payments and ease the burden of student loans on US households by preserving disposable income early in borrowers’ lives. Our model shows substantial welfare gains from these contracts relative to existing plans and gains similar to the Biden administration's proposals but with a significantly lower cost.

Several measures suggest economic outcomes have improved for Indigenous Peoples in recent decades. Yet, institutional settings and gaps in infrastructure and financing continue to hinder their economic progress. Recent efforts have helped address some data gaps, and new institutions are helping Indigenous communities to overcome historic barriers to growth.

The fourth generation of Bank of Canada projection and policy analysis models seeks to improve our understanding of inflation dynamics, the supply side of the economy and the underlying risks faced by policy-makers coming from uncertainty about how the economy functions.

We explore quantitative and qualitative information about Canadians who face barriers to making digital payments. We also consider the implications of ongoing digitalization for modern financial inclusion and a potential central bank digital currency.

We apply two machine learning algorithms to forecast monthly growth of house prices and existing homes sales in Canada. Although the algorithms can sometimes outperform a linear model, the improvement in forecast accuracy is not always statistically significant.

This paper provides an overview of digitalization and its economic implications. We assess the scope of digitalization in Canada as well as the challenges related to its measurement.

This paper quantifies tail risks in the outlooks for Canadian inflation and real GDP growth by estimating their conditional distributions at a daily frequency. We show that the tail risk probabilities derived from the conditional distributions accurately reflect realized outcomes during the sample period from 2002 to 2022.