The Canadian Women Economists Committee/Comité des Femmes Économistes Canadiennes was created in 2017 as a standing committee of the Canadian Economic Association charged with supporting and promoting the advancement of women in the Canadian economics profession. We interpret 'women' broadly, to include those who identify as a woman and those whose gender expression may be perceived by society as being associated with being a woman or female. 

It follows directly from the Canadian Women Economist Network (CWEN) which was founded in 1990 as an independent association of persons interested in promoting women economists and their ideas. The change from CWEN to CWEC recognizes that this responsibility of supporting and promoting women does not just fall on women alone, but on the profession as a whole. Over the past three decades, CWEC/CWEN has been instrumental in promoting women’s involvement with and within the wider Canadian economics community.

Check out our Winter 2026 Newsletter featuring an interview with Lisa Stockley (Charles River Associates).

Job Opportunities

Economics (Limited Term) Assistant Professor at the University of New Brunswick. See the full listing here.

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CEDC and CWEC/CFEC joint virtual mentoring event

March 11, 3pm PT/4pm MT/5pm CT/6pm ET/7pm AT/7:30pm NT

Pursuing a Career Outside Academia

Speaker: Austin Nichols (Amazon)

Register Here by March 10. 

Brown Bag Seminar Series 

Join our general mailing list to receive the zoom link for each date.

Next talks up to April 2026

held on the last Monday of every month (10am PT/11am MT/12pm  CT/1pm  ET/2pm  AT/2:30pm NT).

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?

Share your link to your work:

CWEC/CFÉC is starting a new initiative to share work by Canadian Women Economists and/or on gender-related topics in Economics. Please fill in this form to get your work listed on our website - we update submissions at the end of the month starting January 31 2025. 

By Canadian Woman economist we mean the following. The word ‘woman’ is interpreted quite broadly to include those who identify as a woman and those whose gender expression may be perceived by society as being associated with being a woman or female. "Canadian" means that you are either a Canadian working abroad or a person working in Canada. Canadian citizenship is not required if you work in Canada.

2nd Queen’s WECAN Conference (Queen’s Women Economists in Canada Conference)

 From the organizers: 

We are excited to let you know that the Queen’s Economics Department (QED) and the John Deutsch Institute for the Study of Economic Policy (JDI) are hosting the 2nd Queen’s WECAN Conference (Queen’s Women Economists in Canada Conference). The one-day conference aims to celebrate and highlight the research contributions of women economists across Canada. We would like to invite you to this year’s conference at the Delta Hotel in Kingston, Ontario on Saturday, May 9, 2026.

We believe this intimate, annual conference format will complement the important goals and efforts of the Canadian Women Economists Committee (CWEC) by providing an additional valuable platform for engagement and recognition.

Each year, the Queen’s WECAN Conference will spotlight a different field in economics, with the second year focusing on Labour Economics, Education, and related fields. Our speakers this year feature five economists from Canadian universities: Serena Canaan (Simon Fraser University), Elizabeth Caucutt (Western University), Sonia Laszlo (McGill University), Clementine Van Effenterre (University of Toronto), and Angela Zheng (McMaster University). The conference website with the preliminary program and details can be found here.

The conference will wrap up with a reception and dinner, to which you are cordially invited. There is no fee for registration or for the lunch, reception, or dinner. The program is designed to allow an efficient day trip, and we have reserved a number of rooms at the Delta Kingston Waterfront Hotel at a special rate for those of you who prefer to stay overnight. Unfortunately, we are unable to assist with travel or accommodation costs. A link for booking accommodations at the Delta Hotel is available on the conference website. The registration link will be available on the website soon, with a deadline of April 17th.

This year's QED Frontiers of Macroeconomics Workshop is scheduled for May 8th, also at the Delta Hotel. We encourage attendees to stay for both conferences. The Frontiers of Macroeconomics workshop will feature talks from Cristina Arellano (Minneapolis Fed), Rui Castro (Montreal), Fatih Guvenen (Toronto), Natalia Kovrijnykh (ASU), and Ben Lester (Philadelphia Fed). Past conference programs can be found here.

We sincerely hope you will join us to hear some excellent speakers, discuss research, and meet colleagues this May. Please feel free to forward this email to colleagues. We look forward to an enjoyable day and to seeing you in Kingston.

Regards,

Beverly Lapham,   Amy Hongfei Sun,  Ming Xu,  Karen Ye