Do financial constraints amplify or dampen the transmission of monetary policy to the real economy? To answer this question, we propose a simple empirical strategy that combines (i) firm-level employment and balance sheet data, (ii) identified monetary policy shocks and (iii) survey data on...

Predicting the economy's short-term dynamics-a vital input to economic agents' decisionmaking process-often uses lagged indicators in linear models. This is typically sufficient during normal times but could prove inadequate during crisis periods such as COVID-19. This paper demonstrates: (a)...

The market for payments is an important two-sided one, where consumers benefit from increased merchant acceptance of payment cards and vice versa. The dependence between the decisions that are made on each side of the market results in various network externalities that are often discussed but...

We use data from online job postings listed on a job board to study how the demand for jobs linked to new technologies during the COVID-19 crisis responded to pandemic mitigation policies. We classify job postings into a standard occupation classification, using text analytics, and we group...

We provide an analysis of cash trends in Canada before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. Focusing on the pandemic period, we explore the implications on demand for, use of and access to cash. We find that cash demand has been strong pre-pandemic and increased sharply during the pandemic. While...

Predicting the economy's short-term dynamics-a vital input to economic agents' decisionmaking process-often uses lagged indicators in linear models. This is typically sufficient during normal times but could prove inadequate during crisis periods such as COVID-19. This paper demonstrates: (a)...

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 large dataset of disaggregated industrial production series for the US economy. Our results...

Forecast combinations, also known as ensemble models, routinely require practitioners to select a model from a massive number of potential candidates. Ten explanatory variables can be grouped into 21078 forecast combinations, and the number of possibilities increases further to 21078+21078 if we...

This report studies the dynamics of Bitcoin awareness and ownership from 2016 to 2021, using the Bank of Canada's Bitcoin Omnibus Surveys (BTCOS). In 2021, Canadians' awareness of Bitcoin remained stable at about 90%, while ownership increased to 13% from the 5% observed in 2018-2020. Canadian...