In recent years, the rise in digital payment innovations such as contactless cards and Interac e-Transfer has spurred a discussion about the future of cash at the point of sale. The COVID19 pandemic has also contributed to this discussion: While consumers reported that some merchants started to...

In this paper, we estimate the distribution of future inflation and growth in real gross domestic product (GDP) for the Canadian economy at a daily frequency. To do this, we model the conditional moments (mean, variance, skewness and kurtosis) of inflation and GDP growth as moving averages of...

This paper examines whether machine learning (ML) algorithms can outperform a linear model in predicting monthly growth in Canada of both house prices and existing home sales. The aim is to apply two widely used ML techniques (support vector regression and multilayer perceptron) in economic...

Global climate change is increasing the frequency and severity of natural disasters. We use detailed consumer credit data to investigate the impact of the 2016 Fort McMurray wildfire, the costliest wildfire disaster in Canadian history, on consumers' financial stress. We focus on the arrears of...

This paper quantifies global demand, supply and uncertainty shocks and compares two major global recessions: the 2008-09 Great Recession and the COVID-19 pandemic. We use two alternate approaches to decompose economic shocks: text mining techniques on earning call transcripts and a structural...

We study whether the credit default swap (CDS) spreads of firms reflect the risk from climate transition. We first construct a climate transition risk (CTR) factor by using information on the vulnerability of a firm's value to the transition to a low-carbon economy. We then document how this...

We introduce generalized autoregressive gamma (GARG) processes, a class of autoregressive and moving-average processes that extends the class of existing autoregressive gamma (ARG) processes in one important dimension: each conditional moment dynamic is driven by a different and identifiable...

Commodity markets are linked through international trade but are separated by heterogeneous regulations and input markets. We investigate theoretically and empirically how regional, as opposed to global, cost shocks pass through into global prices. Capacity constraints mitigate the output...

Copyright law grants copyright owners exclusive rights so that they have adequate financial incentives to create and innovate. However, when firms are copyright owners, they can leverage their right to sell or distribute products exclusively and thus obtain excessive financial gains. This paper...

Bayesian predictive synthesis is a flexible method of combining density predictions. The flexibility comes from the ability to choose an arbitrary synthesis function to combine predictions. I study the choice of synthesis function when combining large numbers of predictions-a common occurrence...