Staff research

In recent years, the governments of Ontario and British Columbia have imposed taxes on purchases by non-Canadian residents of residential properties in certain jurisdictions.

Motivated by the observation that survey expectations of stock returns are inconsistent with rational return expectations under real-world probabilities, we investigate whether alternative expectations hypotheses entertained in the literature on asset pricing are consistent with the survey evidence.

This paper studies how the outcome of Bayesian persuasion depends on a sender’s information. I study a game in which, prior to the sender’s information disclosure, the designer can restrict the most informative signal that the sender can generate.

Policy implications are derived for an inflation-targeting central bank, whose credibility is endogenous and depends on its past ability to achieve its targets. This is done in a New Keynesian framework with heterogeneous and boundedly rational expectations.

When redeeming shares for investors, bond fund managers must choose a mix of cash and bond sales to honour their commitments. This note uses machine learning algorithms to uncover new patterns in decisions fund managers make to meet redemptions.

Underlying wage growth has fallen short of what would be consistent with an economy operating with little or no slack. While many factors could explain this weakness, the availability of additional labour resources from informal (“gig”) work—not fully captured in standard measures of employment and hours worked—may play a role.

The countercyclical capital buffer is part of Basel III, the set of regulatory measures developed in response to the financial crisis of 2007–09. This study focuses on how time-varying capital buffers can address inefficiencies in economies with endogenous financial crises.

This paper studies optimal need-based financial aid when parental transfers—unobserved by policymakers—vary across and within families of similar means. Using data on U.S. college students, I document substantial inequality in parental transfers, especially among wealthier families. I then analyze how this affects aid design aimed at reducing inefficiencies from borrowing constraints and the aid itself.

The market for cryptoassets has exploded in size in the 10 years since bitcoin was launched. The technology underlying cryptoassets, blockchain, has also been held up as a technology that promises to transform entire industries.

This note analyzes the evolution of the narrative in the Bank of Canada’s Monetary Policy Report (MPR). It presents descriptive statistics on the core text, including length, most frequently used words and readability level—the three Ls. Although each Governor of the Bank of Canada focuses on the macroeconomic events of the day and the mandate of inflation targeting, we observe that the language used in the MPR varies somewhat from one Governor’s tenure to the next.