E24 - Employment; Unemployment; Wages; Intergenerational Income Distribution; Aggregate Human Capital
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Potential Output in Canada: 2018 Reassessment
This note summarizes the reassessment of potential output, conducted by the Bank of Canada for the April 2018 Monetary Policy Report. Overall, the profile for potential output growth is expected to remain flat at 1.8 per cent between 2018 and 2020 and 1.9 per cent in 2021. -
Can Media and Text Analytics Provide Insights into Labour Market Conditions in China?
The official Chinese labour market indicators have been seen as problematic, given their small cyclical movement and their only-partial capture of the labour force. In our paper, we build a monthly Chinese labour market conditions index (LMCI) using text analytics applied to mainland Chinese-language newspapers over the period from 2003 to 2017. -
The Impacts of Minimum Wage Increases on the Canadian Economy
This note reviews the channels through which scheduled minimum wage increases over the coming years may affect Canadian economic activity and inflation and assesses their macroeconomic impacts. From reduced-form estimates of direct minimum wage pass-through, we find that consumer price index (CPI) inflation could be boosted by about 0.1 percentage point (pp) on average in 2018. -
Alternative Scenario to the October 2017 MPR Base-Case Projection: Higher Potential Growth
We construct an alternative scenario in which trend labour input and business investment are stronger than that expected in the Bank of Canada’s base-case projection in the October 2017 Monetary Policy Report. -
Downward Nominal Wage Rigidity in Canada: Evidence Against a “Greasing Effect”
The existence of downward nominal wage rigidity (DNWR) has often been used to justify a positive inflation target. It is traditionally assumed that positive inflation could “grease the wheels” of the labour market by putting downward pressure on real wages, easing labour market adjustments during a recession. -
Labour Force Participation: A Comparison of the United States and Canada
This note explores the drivers behind the recent increase in the US participation rate in the labour market and assesses the likelihood of a similar gain in Canada. The growth in the US participation rate has largely been due to a pickup in the participation of prime-age workers following a post-recession decline. -
Wage Growth in Canada and the United States: Factors Behind Recent Weakness
This note examines the relatively subdued pace of wage growth in Canada since the commodity price decline in 2014 and assesses whether the weakness is attributable to cyclical (e.g., labour market slack) or structural factors (e.g., resource reallocation and demographic change). -
Downward Nominal Wage Rigidity, Inflation and Unemployment: New Evidence Using Micro‐Level Data
Recent evidence suggests that the extent of downward nominal wage rigidity (DNWR) in the Canadian labour market has risen following the 2008–09 recession (see Brouillette, Kostyshyna and Kyui 2016). -
Downward Nominal Wage Rigidity Meets the Zero Lower Bound
We add downward nominal wage rigidity to a standard New Keynesian model with sticky prices and wages, where the zero lower bound on nominal interest rates is allowed to bind. We find that wage rigidity not only reduces the frequency of zero bound episodes but also mitigates the severity of corresponding recessions. -
Constrained Efficiency with Adverse Selection and Directed Search
Constrained efficient allocation (CE) is characterized in a model of adverse selection and directed search (Guerrieri, Shimer, and Wright (2010)). CE is defined to be the allocation that maximizes welfare, the ex-ante utility of all agents, subject to the frictions of the environment.