Event Details: 

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The Canadian Women Economist Committee (CWEC/CFEC) is pleased to present the brownbag seminar schedule for winter/spring 2026. The seminars are held on the last Monday of every month (10 AM PT/11 AM MT/12 PM CT/1 PM ET/2 PM AT).

Next talks up to April 2026

March 30

Yin Shi, University of Victoria, Forecasting Carbon Dioxide Emissions in Canada: An Empirical Macroeconomic Framework

This study examines the short-term macroeconomic and emissions impacts of climate policy in Canada. Canada's climate policy increasingly relies on production-side measures, including carbon pricing and the potential use of carbon capture and storage. A key challenge for policymakers is assessing the short-term (5-10 years) macroeconomic and emissions impacts of these policies using public data. 
We address this challenge by constructing an empirical macroeconomic framework that allows short-term forecasting of economic activity and CO2 emissions for Canada under alternative policy scenarios. To run the model, we develop an open-source R package that directly interfaces with publicly accessible data sources, including Statistics Canada and Trade Data Online. To our knowledge, this is the first open-source empirical macroeconomic framework designed to jointly forecast economic activity and Carbon Dioxide emissions for Canada using exclusively public data.
Building on the Open Source Empirical Macroeconomic (OSEM) modelling framework, our model supports policy scenario analysis specifically in Canada. Using data prior to 2024 when the federal consumer carbon tax was still in place, preliminary results indicate that Canadian CO2 emissions decline in a baseline scenario without further increases in producer-carbon pricing and without the implementation of large-scale carbon capture and storage policies.

Nwakego Eyisi, Telfer School of Management, Measuring Front-End Innovation in Data-Constrained Economies: A New Index and Its Application to the FEI–Trade Nexus in Emerging Markets

This study investigates the institutional mechanisms through which innovation emerges using a newly constructed front-end innovation (FEI) index for fifty-one emerging markets from 1996 to 2023. The results show that the FEI index is more responsive to health care financing structures than to disease incidence or statistical capacity. Moreover, FEI is significantly more sensitive to institutional mechanisms in frontier markets, suggesting that demand-driven early-stage experimentation is more salient in environments characterized by weaker state capacity. Together, these findings challenge dominant models that treat innovation primarily as a function of formal R&D investment or patents. They instead support a broader view of innovation as an adaptive response to institutional environments, particularly under conditions of uncertainty and constraint. Methodologically, the findings highlight the value of reduced-form approaches grounded in institutional credibility rather than shock-based identification strategies for analyzing FEI in data-constrained developing countries.

April 27

Justine Guillochon, Laval University, Green Tax Pass-Through to Retail Fuel Prices and Firm Heterogeneity: Evidence from France

Apoorva Babbar, University of Calgari, Generative AI in Corporate Settings: Does Gender Matter?