Applying the Wage-Common to Canadian Provinces

Jonathan Lachaine

No 2018-16, Staff Analytical Notes from Bank of Canada

Abstract: As at the national level, available sources of hourly wage data for Canadian provinces sometimes send conflicting signals about wage growth. This note has two objectives. First, we develop a common measure of provincial wages (the provincial wage-common) to better capture the underlying wage pressures, reflecting the overall trend across all data sources. Second, we focus on recent wage developments in Quebec, Ontario, Alberta and British Columbia and the relationship between wage growth in these provinces and some macroeconomic drivers. We conclude that a provincial wage-common provides, for the most part, superior estimates than each of the data sources taken individually because of their timeliness, lower volatility and good relationships with fundamentals. A key finding of our analysis is that the wage-common measures of provinces with a strong energy sector, such as Alberta, are more closely correlated with the national measure and are also more sensitive to oil price shocks than the wage-common measures of the other provinces.

Keywords: Econometric and statistical methods; Labour markets; Recent economic and financial developments (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C C3 C38 J J3 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 21 pages
Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.bankofcanada.ca/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/san2018-16.pdf Full text (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bca:bocsan:18-16

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Staff Analytical Notes from Bank of Canada 234 Wellington Street, Ottawa, Ontario, K1A 0G9, Canada. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().