We revisit the measurement of the sources and consequences of job displacement using Canadian job separation records. To circumvent administrative data limitations, conventional approaches address selection by identifying displacement effects through mass-layoff separations, which are...

There are indications that business dynamism has declined in advanced economies. In particular, firm entry and exit rates have fallen, suggesting that the creative destruction process has lost some of its vitality. Meanwhile, productivity growth has slowed. Some believe that lower entry and exit...

In a small open economy fluctuations in the real exchange rate can affect plant turnover, and thus aggregate productivity, by altering the makeup of plants that populate the market. An appreciation of the local currency increases the level of competition in the domestic market as import...

We study optimal unemployment insurance (UI) policy over the business cycle, using a heterogeneous agent job-search model with aggregate risk and incomplete markets. We validate the model-implied micro and macro labor market elasticities to changes in the generosity of UI benefits against...

Macroeconomists have traditionally ignored the behavior of temporary price markdowns ("sales") by retailers. Although sales are common in the micro price data, they are assumed to be unrelated to macroeconomic phenomena and generally filtered out. We challenge this view. First, using the 1996 -...

This paper takes a full-information model-based approach to evaluate the link between investment-specific technology and the inverse of the relative price of investment. The two-sector model presented includes monopolistic competition where firms can vary the markup charged on their product...

There is currently a policy debate on potential refinements to monetary policy regimes in countries with low and stable inflation such as the U.S. and Canada. For example, in Canada, a systematic review of the current inflation targeting framework is underway. An issue that has generally...

The early work of Tobin (1958) showed that portfolio allocation decisions can be reduced to a two stage process: first decide the relative allocation of assets across the risky assets, and second decide how to divide total wealth between the risky assets and the safe asset. This so called...

Asymmetric shocks are common in markets; securities'; payoffs are not normally distributed and exhibit skewness. This paper studies the portfolio holdings of heterogeneous agents with preferences over mean, variance and skewness, and derives equilibrium prices. A three funds separation theorem...

This paper studies the evolution of individual earnings inequality and dynamics in Canada from 1983 to 2016 using tax files and administrative records. Linking these individuals to their employers (and rich administrative records on firms) beginning in 2001, it also documents the relationship...