Staff research

Using Canadian firm-level market shares and an oligopolistic model, the paper shows that a 25% counter-tariff on U.S. imports raises Canada's aggregate price index by 0.66%, far below direct cost pass-through predictions due to consumer substitution and markup adjustments.

We develop a framework to quantify how tariff changes on imported goods affect sectoral and aggregate consumption prices through direct and production-network channels. Using Canada's input-output matrix and administrative firm-good import data for the universe of Canadian firms, we estimate price elasticities for tariffs on U.S.-imported goods.

Prima is the Bank of Canada’s new model for projection and policy analysis. It builds on the economic foundations of earlier Bank models, adding detail on how sectoral pressures affect production costs and their pass-through to consumer prices.

Producer price indexes measure changes in the prices that producers receive for their outputs or that they pay for their inputs. Statistics Canada publishes a range of producer price indexes for specific products and industries. For the first time, these series have been combined into a small set of broad sectoral measures.

Setting the target rate is the most visible part of monetary policy, but the monetary policy implementation framework is what helps ensure that decision is reflected in financial markets. Through the design and use of its tools and facilities, the Bank of Canada helps keep short-term market interest rates close to the policy target, while preserving incentives for market participants to trade and actively manage liquidity.

Renting has become significantly more expensive in Canada in recent years. Asking rents—those advertised for vacant units—rose sharply as demand grew faster than supply. As tenants move and sign new leases, changes in asking rents gradually spread to the average rents captured in the consumer price index.

Although inflation has come down from pandemic highs, many households are still feeling the effects of higher prices. Between 2020 and 2025, younger and lower-income households generally saw spending outpace income gains while older and higher-income households fared better. Together, these differing experiences meant income gains for the average household kept up with higher spending.

This paper examines the direct effects of industrial robot adoption on workers and owners within Canadian private corporations. Adoption increases firm scale and per-worker payroll but does not decrease the labor share of value added. Conventional accounting of labor income earned by owners masks the impact on non-owner workers.

Portfolio-balance models of the yield curve are notoriously hard to estimate. This paper offers a simple, two-step estimation approach that can be implemented with standard term structure estimation methods. In our application to U.S. Treasury data, our method recovers economically interpretable drivers of the yield curve.

Building on our earlier quantum algorithm, this paper shows that reordering queued payments can significantly reduce liquidity needs. The algorithm performs well on smaller payment batches, while traditional algorithms can process larger batches and deliver greater savings. Machine learning also helps identify which payment patterns offer the greatest potential for improvement.