Staff discussion papers

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.

We explore the implications of digitalization for monetary policy, both in terms of how monetary policy affects the economy and in terms of data analysis and communication with the public.

We examine the relationship between digitalization and productivity, the factors that influence this relationship, and how digitalization’s effect on productivity could change firm behaviour.

In this paper, the authors assess the relationship between digitalization and labour demand and supply, and how this relationship affects wages and income inequality. We also explore implications of recent digitalization trends for the future of work.

We discuss the payment habits of Canadians both in the current payment environment and in a hypothetical cashless environment.

We find that Bitcoin ownership declined from 13% in 2021 to 10% in 2022. This drop occurred against a background of steep price declines and an increasingly tight regulatory atmosphere.

We construct new indicators of demand and supply for the Canadian economy by using natural language processing techniques to analyze earnings calls of publicly listed firms. Our results indicate that the new indicators could help central banks identify inflationary pressures in real time.

We use bid data from Government of Canada bond auctions between 1999 and 2021 to gauge the yield sensitivity of these bonds to the issuance amount. Our new metric estimates the demand function of the bidders at each auction and offers insights into the relationship between supply and yield of government bonds.

Since 2022, consumer inflation expectations have shifted, with a significant increase in those expecting high inflation in the coming year and a surge in those expecting deflation further in the future. Using data from the Canadian Survey of Consumer Expectations, this paper seeks to assess the factors that influence people to expect high inflation, moderate inflation or deflation.