Econometric and statistical methods
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Chinese Monetary Policy and Text Analytics: Connecting Words and Deeds
What are the main drivers behind the monetary policy reaction function of the People’s Bank of China? -
Using Payments Data to Nowcast Macroeconomic Variables During the Onset of COVID-19
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. -
Losing Contact: The Impact of Contactless Payments on Cash Usage
Contactless payment cards are a competitive alternative to cash. Using Canadian panel data from 2010 to 2017, this study investigates whether contactless credit cards are an important contributor to the decline in the transactional use of cash. -
The Determinants of Consumers’ Inflation Expectations: Evidence from the US and Canada
We compare the determinants of consumer inflation expectations in the US and Canada by analyzing two current surveys. We find that Canadian consumers rely more on professional forecasts and the history of actual inflation when forming their expectations, while US consumers rely more on their own lagged expectations. -
Earnings Dynamics and Intergenerational Transmission of Skill
How are your past, current and future earnings related to those of your parents? We explore this by using 37 years of Canadian tax data on two generations. -
Understanding Trend Inflation Through the Lens of the Goods and Services Sectors
The goods and services sectors have experienced considerably different dynamics over the past three decades. Our goal in this paper is to understand how such contrasting behaviors at the sectoral level affect the aggregate level of trend inflation dynamics. -
On Causal Networks of Financial Firms: Structural Identification via Non-parametric Heteroskedasticity
Banks’ business interactions create a network of relationships that are hidden in the correlations of bank stock returns. But for policy interventions, we need causality to understand how the network changes. Thus, this paper looks for the causal network anticipated by investors. -
The New Benchmark for Forecasts of the Real Price of Crude Oil
How can we assess the quality of a forecast? We propose a new benchmark to evaluate forecasts of temporally aggregated series and show that the real price of oil is more difficult to predict than we thought. -
Cyclicality of Schooling: New Evidence from Unobserved Components Models
What is the time-varying impact of economic cycles on decisions to invest in human capital?