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 Financial 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
July 12, 2023
EDUCATION
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January 2016 - Rotterdam, The Netherlands
PH.D. ECONOMICS TINBERGEN INSTITUTE - ERASMUS UNIVERSITY
Title: Essays on the Empirics of International Financial Markets
Promotor: Prof. Casper De Vries
Supervisor: Dr. Lorenzo Pozzi
September 2011 - Tilburg, The Netherlands
RESEARCH MASTER ECONOMICS - TILBURG UNIVERSITY
Thesis title: Determinants of Export Taxation
Supervisor: Prof. Jenny Ligthart
September 2009 - Tilburg, The Netherlands
M.SC. ECONOMICS - TILBURG UNIVERSITY
Thesis title: Electricity Network Regulation: the Argentinean reform
Supervisor: Dr. Bert Willems
September 2026 - June 2028
PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE
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March 2016 - to date Ottawa, Canada
BANK OF CANADA
Senior Economist - International Economics Department - United States Division
March 2015 - September 2015 Amsterdam, The Netherlands
DANUM ADVISORS
Macroeconomic Analyst
March 2014 - May 2014 Oslo, Norway
NORGES BANK
Ph.D. Intern
September 2006 - August 2008 Buenos Aires, Argentina
INTER-AMERICAN DEVELOPMENT BANK
Research Assistant to Project Manager
RESEARCH
Publications
ASSESSING THE PREDICTIVE ABILITY OF SOVEREIGN DEFAULT RISK ON EXCHANGE RATES (JOINT WITH PROF. FRANCESCO RAVAZZOLO AND CLAUDIA FORONI)
Journal of International Money and Finance (2018) - Link to WP
This paper explores the predictive ability of interest rate factors and sovereign default risk on exchange rate returns. We investigate the possible pass-through of risk in the sovereign bond markets to currency markets. To this end, we extend the no-predictability random walk model with the level and slope factors of the interest rate yield curve and the default and recovery risk intensities from credit default risk swaps. Existing literature points to common underlying factors driving both the term structure of interest rate and exchange rates. The term structure of interest rate reflects agents expectations about risk. By including a separate measure of default risk we attempt to disentangle the default risk expectations from risk premium measures. We find that the inclusion of these four factors improves in accuracy upon the benchmark model.
DETECTING SCAPEGOAT EFFECTS IN THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN EXCHANGE RATES AND MACROECONOMIC FUNDAMENTALS: A NEW APPROACH (JOINT WITH LORENZO POZZI)
Macroeconomic Dynamics (2018) - Link to WP
This paper presents a new testing method for the scapegoat model of exchange rates. A number of steps are implemented to determine whether macro fundamentals are scapegoats for the evolution of exchange rates. Estimation is conducted using a Bayesian Gibbs sampling approach applied to eight countries (five developed, three emerging) versus the US over the period 2002Q1-2014Q4. The macro fundamentals that we consider are real GDP growth, the inflation rate, the long-run nominal interest rate and the current account to GDP ratio. We calculate the posterior probabilities that these macro fundamentals are scapegoats. For the inflation rate, these probabilities are considerably higher than the imposed prior probabilities of 1/2 in five out of eight countries (in particular, the Anglo-Saxon economies).
CHARACTERIZING THE SCHOOLING CYCLE (JOINT WITH PROF. SUNCICA VUJIC AND SOFIA MAIER)
Economic Modelling (2024) - Link to IZA WP
This paper examines the cyclical dynamics of school participation decision, using data for 16-24-year-olds attending full-time post-compulsory education in the UK in the period from 1995Q1 to 2019Q4. We find evidence of a highly persistent education cycle, largely explained by the business cycle. Importantly, the response of school participation to the business cycle is time-dependent – counter-cyclical in the period around the Great Financial Crisis and pro-cyclical in other years. We propose two channels as predictors of the cyclicality of schooling – the ability-to-pay for further education and the opportunity-cost of spending time in education rather than at work. We also show that the results are heterogeneous by gender, with female choices being more responsive to changes in aggregate macroeconomic conditions than male choices. Timely policy interventions using regular education as a counter-cyclical tool can help prevent persistent or permanent unemployment in the aftermath of a crisis.
Work in progress
COVID-19 AND JOB SEARCH IN THE U.S.: GREAT RESIGNATION OR HEALTH RISK UNCERTAINTY? (JOINT WITH PROF. STEVEN LEHRER)
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 JEANNINE BAILLIU AND XINFEN HAN)
Work in progress - 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.
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.
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.
Work in progress - Link to draft - Submitted
We gauge the replicability of the results of Forsythe (2022) studying the cyclicality of individuals’ labor market transitions conditional on their experience. Using Current Population Survey (CPS) data and state-level variation in cyclical unemployment, this paper shows that the hiring probability of youths is more sensitive to business-cycle conditions than that of experienced individuals. We replicate the main results in this paper by reconstructing the dataset using data from the IPUMS-CPS database (Flood et al. (2020)) and recoding the paper’s main regressions. We also conduct a robustness replicability analysis and show that the paper’s main results are robust in terms of statistical significance to (i) extending the sample period from 1994-2014 to 1994-2019 and (ii) using MSA-level unemployment variation instead of state-level variation. However, these extensions reduce the magnitude of the main effects of interest. The paper’s key conclusions are unaffected.
CLIMATE CHANGE AND SOCIO-ECONOMIC INEQUALITY IN THE U.S. (JOINT WITH TATJANA DAHLHAUS)
Work in progress
We study the effects of climate change on income inequality in the United States. The existing literature focuses on two specific aspects of climate change i.e., mean temperatures and extreme events (e.g. flooding). However, these two aspects fail to capture some meteorological phenomena relevant to economic outcomes. For instance, changes in mean temperatures could be asymmetric across seasons, with heterogeneous implications across regions and segments of the population. Against this backdrop, we propose to model climate change by looking at the whole distribution of temperatures, as opposed to a few selected moments. Our framework is more general and jointly captures different aspects of climate change, which may be related in terms of timing or causality. Equipped with our approach, we plan to contribute to the literature on the economic implications of climate change, with an emphasis on within-country inequality as opposed to most of existing studies that have focused instead on the effects on economic growth or cross-country inequality.
TEACHING
2- DAY COURSE - BANK OF CANADA
Short introductory course on unobserved components time series models fundamentals with focus on state-space specification and Kalman filter/smoother estimation.
COURSES AT ERASMUS UNIVERSITY ROTTERDAM
Seminar of International Finance - Master program
Advanced Macroeconomics - Master program
Macroeconomics - Bachelor program
COURSES AT TILBURG UNIVERSITY
Statistics - Bachelor program
OTHER ACTIVITIES
CONFERENCES AND SEMINARS
RGS Doctoral Conference - Ruhr University Bochum (27-28 February 2013)
Internal Seminar at Erasmus University - Rotterdam (March 2013)
SNDE 2013 - University Milano-Bicocca (28-29 March 2013)
ZEW Macroconference - University of Mannheim (18-19 July 2013)
EEA Conference - University of Gothenburg (26-30 August 2013)
RGS Doctoral Conference - Dortmund University (27-28 February 2014)
Internal Seminar at Norges Bank - Olso (March - May 2014)
Netherlands Economists Day (NED) - Amsterdam (31 October 2014)
SNDE 2015 - Norwegian Business School - Oslo (19-20 March 2015)
SUMMER SCHOOLS
Barcelona Graduate School of Economics (2013)
Exchange rates predictability (Prof. Barbara Rossi)
Modelling non-stationary and non-linear time series (Prof. Perez-Quiroz and Prof. Mayoral)
Empirical time series methods for macroeconomic analysis (Prof. Gambetti)
Technical University of Lisbon (2012)
Modelling financial time series with GAUSS
Cass Business School (2012)
Time series analysis
REFERENCES
Associate Professor,
Departments of Economics and Business,
School of Economics
Professor of Econometrics,
Faculty of Economics and Management