We estimate the impact of cyclical, sectoral, and participation shocks and that of the trend on both the Canadian unemployment rate and the job vacancy rate over the 1969 to 1998 period. We conclude that a rise in the Canadian unemployment rate of almost 5 percentage units occurred between 1972...

Considerable attention has been given in the last ten years to estimation of the importance of sectoral shifts in explaining short-term fluctuations in unemployment. Recent studies have used US stock prices data to develop indexes of sectoral shocks less affected by cyclical influence than...

Financial consumers are facing paradoxical situations. On the one hand, they are overly solicited to use credits on various forms. On the other hand, segments of the population do not have access to credit. In this paper, we examine some emerging issues regarding consumer protection and...

This paper seeks to identify the source of the persistent gap between Canadian and US unemployment rates and why the gap has widened more for women than for men. A graphical method is proposed to distinguish between employment shocks and changes in the activity rate. The labor market is also...

In order to identify the variables influencing the Canadian housing market, we estimate a structural model on annual data from 1956 to 2001. This model simultaneously explains the behaviour of the real average housing price and the change in the housing stock as measured by the number of housing...