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From 1870 to 2000, the workweek length of employed persons decreased by 41 per cent in industrialized countries.

We analyze Canadian data from the Bank of Canada’s Business Leaders’ Pulse, examining firms’ sales growth expectations. We find that expected growth predicts outcomes, uncertainty influences forecast errors and revisions, and firms with weak past performance anticipate and experience weaker future growth. These results highlight the survey’s value for understanding business expectations.

A year of financial market strains and economic disruption in 2009 gave way to initial signs of progress in 2010, the year the Bank of Canada celebrates its 75th anniversary. The lessons of the past year vividly illustrate what the Bank has demonstrated repeatedly through seven and a half decades: the value of well-researched policy frameworks and decisive action.

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.

This paper examines Canadian and other foreign firms that have been involuntarily delisted from major U.S. exchanges. I find that, for most countries, less than 10% of firms get delisted from a U.S. exchange during my sample period.

The third strategy employed by the Bank when dealing with uncertainty is the consideration of appropriate simple reaction functions or "rules" for the setting of the policy interest rate. Since John Taylor's presentation of his much-discussed rule, research on simple policy rules has exploded. Simple rules have several advantages. In particular, they are easy to construct and communicate and are believed by some to be robust, in the sense of generating good results in a variety of economic models. This article provides an overview of the recent research regarding the usefulness and robustness of simple monetary policy rules, particularly in models of the Canadian economy. It also describes and explains the role of simple rules in the conduct of monetary policy in Canada.

In our analysis of the US productivity slowdown in the 1970s and 2000s, we find that a significant portion of this deceleration can be attributed to a lack of improvement in allocative efficiency across sectors. Our analysis further identifies increased sector-level volatility as a major contributor to this lack of improvement in allocative efficiency.

In times of high uncertainty, governments often implement interventions such as bailouts to financial institutions. To use public resources efficiently and to avoid major spillovers to the rest of the economy, policy-makers try to identify which institutions should receive assistance.

Fluctuations in the prices of various natural resource products are of concern in both policy and business circles; hence, it is important to develop accurate price forecasts.

In an economy where production takes place in multiple stages and is subject to financial frictions, how firms finance intermediate inputs matters for aggregate outcomes. This paper focuses on trade credit—the lending and borrowing of input goods between firms—and quantifies its aggregate impacts during the Great Recession.