I am a Senior Economist in the International Economic Analysis Department, United States Division at the Bank of Canada in Ottawa.
The overreaching field of my research is applied econometrics. My research projects span over topics in International Economics, Labour Economics and Human Capital Development with a focus on unobserved components time-series models and survey data. 
Contact details:
234 Wellington St. West
Ottawa, ON K1A 0G9
Canada
Phone:+16137827955
E-mail: BSadaba@bank-banque-canada.ca

Work in progress

CHARACTERIZING THE SCHOOLING CYCLE (JOINT WITH PROF. SUNCICA VUJIC AND SOFIA MAIER)

Submitted - Link to draft

This paper develops a novel and tractable empirical approach to estimate the cycle in schooling participation decisions, a.k.a what we denominate the schooling cycle. The estimation procedure is based on unobserved components time series models that decompose higher education enrolment rates into a slow moving stochastic trend and a stationary cyclical factor. This way, we obtain a full characterisation of the cyclical dynamics of schooling participation and analyse its relationship with the business cycle in a time-varying fashion. Using data for 16–24 year-olds attending full-time post-secondary education in the United Kingdom from 1995Q1 to 2019Q4, we find evidence of a very persistent schooling cycle largely but not exclusively explained by the business cycle. Also, we find that the direction of the response of schooling participation to the business cycle, say, pro-, counter- or a-cyclical, is largely time-dependent same as the degree of synchrony between both cycles. We note, however, that results are heterogeneous across gender.

COVID-19 AND JOB SEARCH IN THE U.S.: GREAT RESIGNATION OR HEALTH RISK UNCERTAINTY? (JOINT WITH PROF. STEVEN LEHRER)

Work in progress - Link to draft

Using a novel survey for the U.S. we explore the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on off-the-job search behavior. We find support for the presence of two labor market frictions that influence job search behavior in opposite directions possibly resulting in longer non-employment spells. To see this, we document first that the impact of the pandemic on search efforts differs across demographic groups in such a way that reveals two distinctive groups among the population. Those that search more consist of white males, high-skilled, high-income with young children while those that search less are females, youth, low-skilled and low-income individuals. Additionally, the latter group is largely affected by uncertainty surrounding the evolution of the disease. We relate this findings with the presence of matching frictions caused by individuals quitting their jobs to search for a new career or job that they feel is better suited, a.k.a. the so-called Great Resignation and behavioral responses arising from the uncertainty surrounding the understanding of the disease causing decreasing search efforts.

MACROECONOMIC DISASTERS AND CONSUMPTION SMOOTHING (JOINT WITH LORENZO POZZI)

Work in progress - Link to draft

Macroeconomic disasters (wars, pandemics, depressions) are characterised by drastic shifts and increased volatility of the aggregate consumption to income ratio (or, conversely, the saving ratio). By standard intertemporal budget constraint logic, this ratio is linked to future income and consumption growth rates and therefore should have predictive power for these variables. We investigate whether this predictive ability changes during macroeconomic disasters as this can signal changes in consumer behavior. Through the estimation of panel data regressions for industrial economies using both historical annual data (1870-2015) and recent quarterly data (1995Q1-2020Q4), we find that both historical disasters as well as the current Covid-19 pandemic increase the predictive ability of this ratio for future income and consumption growth rates. These results suggest a reduction in consumption smoothing during disasters. Using a savers-spenders model, we show that this reduction can be interpreted as stemming from an increase during disasters of the number of rule-of-thumb consumers who spend current income in every period as well as from a larger precautionary saving motive of those consumers that do optimize.

CHINESE MONETARY POLICY AND TEXT ANALYTICS: CONNECTING WORDS AND DEEDS (JOINT WITH J. BAILLIU AND X. HAN)

Submitted - Link to draft 

We propose a novel approach to estimating the People's Bank of China (PBOC) monetary policy rule.
Given China's complex monetary policy framework, the PBOC's actions are not well captured by
standard monetary policy rules that can be used for its Western counterparts. This calls for new
approach able to capture the complexities underlying the PBOC's observed behavior. This paper
examines whether information provided in PBOC's official statements can help find their policy rule in
practice. We use Latent Semantic Analysis to extract content information embedded in PBOC
Monetary Policy Reports and examine whether these are significant in explaining Chinese monetary
policy actions.

CLIMATE CHANGE AND SOCIO-ECONOMIC INEQUALITY IN THE U.S.  (JOINT WITH TATJANA DAHLHAUS)

Work in progress

Coming soon

ON THE CYCLICALITY OF WAGE INEQUALITY IN THE U.S. (JOINT WITH DIANA ALESSANDRINI)

Work in progress - Link to draft

We investigate whether wage inequality in the U.S. is dependent on business cycle
fluctuations. The existing literature has shown that wage inequality is acyclical. We
show that this is true on average but the cyclicality has changed substantially over
time. By allowing for time-variation in the relationship between wage inequality and
macroeconomic conditions, we find that wage inequality was highly procyclical in 1988-
1993 and at the onset of the Great Recession, while it was strongly counter-cyclical
in late 1990s and during 2014-2017. On average, the correlation between the cycle of
GDP and that of wage inequality is close to zero, but this average masks heterogeneous
dynamics. We then investigate possible explanations for the change in cyclicality over
time.

MEDIA NEWS INDEX OF CHINESE MONETARY POLICY (JOINT WITH X. HAN AND F. RAVAZZOLO)

Work in progress

Coming soon

CAN JOB-TO-JOB TRANSITIONS PREDICT DOMESTIC INFLATION?

Work in progress

Increased job-seeking on behalf of employed workers, contrary to that of those in non-employment, puts upward pressure on firms' expectations on future labor costs. Therefore, the willingness to search for new jobs of those in employment can convey important information regarding future movements of inflation. In this paper, we investigate the possible pass-through of job-to-job transitions to domestic inflation through changes in firms' expectations on labor costs. We use the CPS measure of the number of job switchers in each specific month to construct our job-to-job transition measure and conduct an out-of-sample forecasting exercise to test whether we can improve upon traditional models of inflation. Our results show that movements across employment matter greatly for inflation.