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When estimating earnings losses upon job separations, existing strategies focus on separations in mass layoffs to distinguish involuntary separations from voluntary separations. We revisit the measurement of the sources and consequences of involuntary job separations using Canadian job separation records.

We investigate alternative student debt contracts that defer payments and ease the burden of student loans on US households by preserving disposable income early in borrowers’ lives. Our model shows substantial welfare gains from these contracts relative to existing plans and gains similar to the Biden administration's proposals but with a significantly lower cost.

We develop a heterogeneous-agent New Keynesian model featuring a frictional labor market with on-the-job search to quantitatively study the positive and normative implications of employer-to-employer transitions for inflation.

A large-scale reduction in mortgage principal can strengthen a recovery, support house prices and lower foreclosures. The nature of the intervention shapes its impact, which rests on how resources are redistributed across households. The availability of bankruptcy on unsecured debt changes the response to large-scale mortgage relief by reducing precautionary savings.

This paper documents a systematic pattern of how wages, hours and their relationship vary across firms of different sizes. Using a model with heterogeneous firms and workers, we show how the interplay between wages, hours and firm size affect worker sorting and inequality.

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.

We find that prices and costs for consumer-oriented firms moved roughly one-for-one during the COVID-19 pandemic. This means firms fully passed rising costs through to the prices they charged. However, our results are suggestive, given data limitations and the uncertainty associated with estimating markups.

We estimate the effects of economic uncertainty on time use and discuss its macroeconomic implications. We develop a model to demonstrate that substitution between market and non-market work provides an additional insurance margin to households, weakening precautionary savings and labour supply and lowering aggregate demand, ultimately amplifying the contractionary effects of uncertainty.

We enhance benchmarks for assessing strength in the Canadian labour market. We find the labour market remains tight despite recent strong increases in labour supply, including among prime-working-age women. We also assess the anticipated easing in labour conditions in a context of high population growth.

We expect that potential output growth will rebound from 1.4% in 2022 to 2.2% on average between 2023 and 2026. We revised down our estimates of growth over 2022–25 relative to the April 2022 assessment. The Canadian nominal neutral rate remains unchanged—in the range of 2% to 3%.