Staff research

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.

We document the macroeconomic patterns that characterize labor market recovery from financial crises. Using a sample of postwar recession episodes from around the world, we show that financial crises are typically followed by jobless recoveries, with a sluggish recovery in employment relative to output.

Weather-related disasters can reduce output while increasing inflation, creating difficult trade-offs for monetary policy. This note reviews evidence on the macroeconomic effects of physical climate risks and uses a structural model to assess how more frequent and severe disasters could shape future monetary policy challenges.

This note presents Segmented Inflation Dynamics (SID), a data-driven tool for assessing trend inflation. SID uses time-series segmentation to divide the price index into contiguous segments with stable inflation rates. Based on data through December 2025, SID indicates that Canada’s trend inflation has been near 2 percent since early 2024.

We investigate whether hedge funds contributed to Government of Canada bond market illiquidity at the onset of the Middle East war in early 2026. We find no evidence they did. Hedge funds remained active in primary auctions, while their secondary market trading remained broadly consistent with their usual relative-value strategies.

In this study, we measure SMBs’ access to cash using the driving distance to financial institution (FI) branches. First, we measure the distance between SMBs and the nearest FI branch. Second, we use a sample of 651 SMBs from the 2023 Merchant Acceptance Survey to examine SMBs’ banking choices.

Repo market imbalances can be large and persistent, and can lift the cost of short-term funding in Canada, including the CORRA benchmark. Banks’ holdings of settlement balances absorbed most of the repo imbalances during QE, but have become far less central by the end of QT.