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12 Results

Machine learning for economics research: when, what and how

Staff Analytical Note 2023-16 Ajit Desai
This article reviews selected papers that use machine learning for economics research and policy analysis. Our review highlights when machine learning is used in economics, the commonly preferred models and how those models are used.

Identifying Nascent High-Growth Firms Using Machine Learning

Staff Working Paper 2023-53 Stephanie Houle, Ryan Macdonald
Firms that grow rapidly have the potential to usher in new innovations, products or processes (Kogan et al. 2017), become superstar firms (Haltiwanger et al. 2013) and impact the aggregate labour share (Autor et al. 2020; De Loecker et al. 2020). We explore the use of supervised machine learning techniques to identify a population of nascent high-growth firms using Canadian administrative firm-level data.

A Blueprint for the Fourth Generation of Bank of Canada Projection and Policy Analysis Models

Staff Discussion Paper 2023-23 Donald Coletti
The fourth generation of Bank of Canada projection and policy analysis models seeks to improve our understanding of inflation dynamics, the supply side of the economy and the underlying risks faced by policy-makers coming from uncertainty about how the economy functions.

Turning Words into Numbers: Measuring News Media Coverage of Shortages

Staff Discussion Paper 2023-8 Lin Chen, Stephanie Houle
We develop high-frequency, news-based indicators using natural language processing methods to analyze news media texts. Our indicators track both supply (raw, intermediate and final goods) and labour shortages over time. They also provide weekly time-varying topic narratives about various types of shortages.

Sectoral Uncertainty

Staff Working Paper 2022-38 Efrem Castelnuovo, Kerem Tuzcuoglu, Luis Uzeda
We propose a new empirical framework that jointly decomposes the conditional variance of economic time series into a common and a sector-specific uncertainty component. We apply our framework to a disaggregated industrial production series for the US economy. We identify unexpected changes in durable goods uncertainty as drivers of downturns, while unexpected hikes in non-durable goods uncertainty are expansionary.

Macroeconomic Predictions Using Payments Data and Machine Learning

Staff Working Paper 2022-10 James Chapman, Ajit Desai
We demonstrate the usefulness of payment systems data and machine learning models for macroeconomic predictions and provide a set of econometric tools to overcome associated challenges.

Business Closures and (Re)Openings in Real Time Using Google Places

The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the need for policy-makers to closely monitor disruptions to the retail and food business sectors. We present a new method to measure business opening and closing rates using real-time data from Google Places, the dataset behind the Google Maps service.

Payment Habits During COVID-19: Evidence from High-Frequency Transaction Data

Staff Working Paper 2021-43 Tatjana Dahlhaus, Angelika Welte
We examine how consumers have adjusted their payment habits during the COVID-19 pandemic. They seem to perform fewer transactions, spend more in each transaction, use less cash at the point of sale and withdraw cash from ATMs linked to their financial institution more often than from other ATMs.

Using Payments Data to Nowcast Macroeconomic Variables During the Onset of COVID-19

Staff Working Paper 2021-2 James Chapman, Ajit Desai
We use retail payment data in conjunction with machine learning techniques to predict the effects of COVID-19 on the Canadian economy in near-real time. Our model yields a significant increase in macroeconomic prediction accuracy over a linear benchmark model.
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