Guy-Arnold Djolaud

This paper provides the first time-series analysis of labour market concentration in Canada and proposes a novel approach to decomposing the underlying mechanisms. National concentration gradually declined from 2001 to 2019, while local concentration rose temporarily by 14 per cent during the Great Recession. The long-run decline reflects two offsetting forces: increased within-industry competition, which reduced concentration, and wage-bill shifts toward more concentrated sectors, which partially offset these gains. During the Great Recession the pattern reverses at the local level: 68 per cent of the increase was driven by sectoral reallocation. A calibrated TANK model with employer market power shows that fiscal expansions compress wage markdowns, increase the labour share and markedly reduce consumption and income inequality between workers and capitalists.

In the standard random-walk state-space model, the likelihood information about an interior NAIRU state, relative to the smoothness precision supplied by the state equation, is proportional to the squared Phillips curve slope. Canadian quarterly data from 1977 to 2026 show the mechanism is quantitatively severe: across the February 1991 inflation-targeting break this ratio falls by a factor of twenty-three, driven almost entirely by the slope. The credible interval for the unemployment gap then contains zero in 97 per cent of quarters, against 73 per cent before, and without a sign restriction the posterior probability of a negative slope falls from 0.99 to 0.78. The result is analytical and holds for any state-space NAIRU model: a smooth posterior path is not evidence that the data locate the NAIRU.

How should a commodity exporter set monetary policy when foreign tariffs and oil prices rise together, and who bears the adjustment? I study this question in a small open economy with nominal household debt, housing collateral and gradual mortgage repricing, calibrated to Canadian data. Under a CPI rule, the policy rate rises and borrowers absorb most of the contraction: their consumption falls by 1.1 per cent on impact, against 0.25 per cent for savers. The Ramsey allocation cuts the rate by 14 basis points, roughly halves the output decline and keeps borrower consumption at its no-shock level, at the cost of higher consumer price inflation. The policy choice is mainly redistributive, and faster mortgage repricing lets a smaller rate cut deliver larger immediate relief to indebted households.

Monetary union pools the foreign reserves that back a shared currency. I show that this pooling insures members against the monetary consequences of national sovereign-debt distress without insuring against default. Monthly central-bank accounts for the eight WAEMU members reveal weak comovement of national foreign claims and divergent national and area-wide reserve coverage during sovereign stress. In a quantitative model of a small member with long-duration defaultable debt, endogenous reserves, a coverage-dependent policy rate and a devaluation hazard, calibrated to Senegal, pooling lowers mean devaluation risk by 82 percent and attenuates the coverage loss from a national shock sevenfold, while equilibrium debt and default frequency rise.

This paper investigates the trajectory of labour market concentration among immigrants in the years following their arrival in Canada, using tax administrative data. We find that immigrants initially enter labour markets with higher concentrations of foreign-born workers. However, this concentration gradually declines over time, reflecting a transition toward more competitive and diverse employment environments as immigrants integrate. These findings contribute to a broader understanding of immigrant labour market assimilation and highlight the role of labour market power in shaping their employment trajectories.

This paper examines the implications of fiscal policy for debt sustainability following an immigration shock. When immigrants enter a country they work, consume and save, but they also age, fall ill and lose jobs, which requires government support. Using a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model featuring life cycle, death risk, skills and labour efficiency, calibrated on Canadian data, we simulate the equilibrium effect of immigration on sustainable debt. Whatever the driver considered, immigration improves fiscal solvency, and the largest changes come from the complementarity of immigrants' skills and their age profile.