Research

This paper provides the first time-series analysis of labour market concentration in Canada, and proposes a novel approach to decomposing and explaining the underlying mechanisms. It shows that national concentration gradually declined from 2001 to 2019, while local concentration experienced a temporary rise of 14% during the Great Recession. Decomposition analysis reveals that 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% of the increase in local concentration was driven by sectoral reallocation toward more concentrated industries. We then develop a calibrated TANK model with employer market power and demonstrate that fiscal expansions compress wage markdowns, increase the labour share, and markedly reduce consumption and income inequality between workers and capitalists.

Pooling foreign-exchange reserves can insure members of a currency union against the monetary consequences of national sovereign-debt distress, even when it does not prevent default. Monthly IMF central-bank accounts for the eight WAEMU members (2007–2026) show low comovement of national foreign claims and a regional coverage ratio about half as volatile as national ones. In a quantitative model of a member economy with long-duration defaultable debt under a fixed parity, pooled backing lowers the mean quarterly devaluation probability from 1.60 to 0.29 percent and sharply weakens the pass-through of national reserve losses to common coverage and the policy rate, while raising equilibrium borrowing (external debt of 53.5 versus 45.7 percent of GDP) and default frequency: insurance against devaluation is not insurance against default.

This paper shows that, 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.

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 percent on impact, against 0.25 percent 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 on impact, at the cost of higher consumer price inflation. The policy choice is mainly redistributive: relative to the CPI rule, borrowers gain the equivalent of 0.11 percent of permanent consumption, savers lose 0.02 percent, and the aggregate gain is negligible. Faster mortgage repricing lets a smaller rate cut deliver larger immediate relief to indebted households.

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.

A descriptive analysis of OECD data suggests that a positive relationship exists between the population share of seniors and public debt as percentage of GDP. This fact points to the relevance of population structure for public finance management. Because Immigration can deeply modify countries’ population structure, we propose a Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium model to evaluate how immigration affects the receiving country sustainable debt and asset prices. Our model features consumer heterogeneity, death risk, population growth, skills, labor efficiency, life cycle with periods of labor inactivity, and social security transfers. We calibrate the model using Canada data and perform a set of experiments. Specifically, we evaluate how each factor characterizing the immigrating population, factors such as immigrants age profile, fertility, or relative labor efficiency, affects the receiving country fiscal solvency. Our response variable is the change in sustainable debt resulting from a temporary immigration shock. Whatever the driver we consider, immigration seems to improve fiscal solvency. Largest changes in sustainable debt result from moves in immigrants’ fertility and relative efficiency in labor.

Contribution to the World Bank Country Climate and Development Report for Côte d’Ivoire: climate finance diagnostics, fiscal policy modelling and green growth scenario analysis.