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Canada’s labour market is tight but beginning to ease. Unemployment will likely rise in turn, but the economy can avoid a recessionary surge given current conditions. Higher unemployment would nonetheless be material, especially for those directly impacted.

Just before the pandemic began, the Bank of Canada conducted the 2020 Wage-Setting Survey. The goal was to explore the unusual trend of subdued wage growth in 2018 and 2019 despite a tightening in the labour market. Although this wage puzzle was beginning to resolve at the time of the survey, results highlight changes in several factors that may have important impacts on wage dynamics.

Data show that income inequality in Canada increased substantially during the 1980s and first half of the 1990s but has been relatively stable over the past 25 years. This increase was felt mainly by low-income earners and younger people, while older people benefited from higher retirement income.

We summarize the theoretical model of central bank asset purchases developed in Cimon and Walton (2022). The model helps us understand how asset purchases ease pressures on investment dealers to restore market conditions in a crisis.

We expect potential output growth to be lower in 2021 than anticipated in the April 2021 assessment. By 2025, growth is expected to reach 2.3%. We assess that the Canadian nominal neutral rate increased slightly to lie in the range of 2.00% to 3.00%.

We propose a range of benchmarks for assessing labour market strength for monetary policy. This work builds on a previous framework that considers how diverse and segmented the labour market is. We apply these benchmarks to the Canadian labour market and find that it has more than recovered from the COVID-19 shock.

COVID-19 affects technology adoption: online job postings for technology-related occupations fall less during pandemic lockdowns and pick up faster during reopenings than postings for more traditional occupations.

This paper quantifies the contribution of human capital accumulation to the growth of real gross domestic product (GDP) in Canada.

During downturns, workers get stuck in low-productivity jobs and wages remain stagnant. I build an heterogenous agent incomplete market model with a full job ladder that accounts for these facts. An adverse financial shock calibrated to the US Great Recession replicates the period’s slow recovery and missing disinflation.

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