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The authors provide some of the first empirical evidence on labour market adjustments to exchange rate movements in Canadian manufacturing industries.

In a search model of production, where agents accumulate heterogeneous amounts of human capital, an individual worker's wage depends on average human capital in the searching population.

The authors document the recent evolution of the self-employment rate in Canada. Between 1987 and 1998, the self-employment rate rose 3.5 percentage points from 13.8 per cent to 17.3 per cent.

To properly account for the dynamics of key macroeconomic variables, researchers incorporate various internal-propagation mechanisms in their models.

Entrepreneurship is a key factor in promoting growth in output and employment. Consequently, to encourage new start-ups, most governments in developed countries have public venture capital programs.

In the year and a half leading up to mid-2003, both employment and labour force participation increased at an unusually rapid pace compared to domestic economic activity. Gains in employment were unusually large, relative to output growth, compared to gains in total hours worked. This is explained by a faster rate of increase in the participation rate of the 55 and older age group, many of whom opted for part-time employment. This shift in the composition of employment contributed to a reduction in the length of the average workweek in 2002. As a result, labour input progressed at a rate that was markedly slower than for employment and more in line with its historical relationship to output growth. The authors anticipate that the 55 and older age group will continue to participate strongly in the labour force, but that as the economy rebounds and uncertainty diminishes, the cyclical component in the growth of part-time work should diminish and that of full-time employment increase. Employment growth should moderate in relation to output growth and there may be a cyclical rebound in labour productivity as total hours worked increases during the initial recovery in output growth.

It has been well documented that the education premium measured by the wage difference between university and high school graduates has remained constant over the past two decades in Canada. Despite this stable pattern at the aggregate level, skill-biased technology could have important implications for the inter-industry wage structure.

The regional offices of the Bank conducted a survey of 140 Canadian companies (representing all non-government sectors of the economy) to study the effects of restructuring (defined as a major change in the way firms do business).

This paper examines whether restructuring in the public sector contributed to the slower cyclical recovery in Canada than in the United States during the 1990s. Changes in public sector employment are used to investigate this question.

This study examines the effect of nominal-wage rigidities on wage growth in Canada using a hazard model and micro data for union contracts. The hazard model is specified in a way that allows considerable flexibility in the shape of the estimated notional wage-change distribution.