John Galbraith

John Galbraith is Professor of Economics at McGill University in Montréal,  Vice-president of the Canadian Economics Association and is a Fellow and president of the Scientific Committee at CIRANO. He has worked largely in the analysis of time series economic data, including non-stationary data and applications in forecasting and forecast evaluation. His recent work, with collaborators at Télécom Paris, concerns the use of large-scale and high-frequency data from consumer transactions for more accurate economic monitoring and forecasting, estimating the effects of extreme events such as forest fires or heatwaves on economic activity, investigating the effects of the movement toward online commerce on inter-regional trade links, and studying individual mobility.

The project

Title: Economic monitoring using high-frequency transaction data

"The general theme of the research is the use of data on individuals’ purchasing transactions, processed through credit or debit cards, to monitor economic activity and to study economic behaviour and events; this has become a much more active research area in recent years as these data have become more widely available. One feature of economic policy decisions which has been a problem since national governments began to engage in macroeconomic management is that policymakers have typically had no choice other than to base decisions on data which were often measured months before the present date. To take an example, even in the present day, national level data on gross domestic product for the last quarter of the year (October through the end of December) become available in most countries only around the end of February. By contrast, realtime transaction data allow monitoring of daily changes in consumption as the month is proceeding"

Hosting institution: Télécom Paris, Institut Polytechnique de Paris

Selective Bibliography

• Bounie, D., Y. Camara and J.W. Galbraith (2023) ``Consumer Mobility and Expenditure during the COVID-19 Containments: Evidence from French Transaction Data''. European Economic Review 151, 104326.
• Galbraith, J.W. (2023) ``Real-time Transaction Data for Nowcasting and Short-term Economic Forecasting.'' In Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Economics and Finance, Oxford University Press.
• Galbraith, J.W. and V. Zinde-Walsh (2020) ``Simple and Reliable Estimators of Coefficients of Interest in a Model with Many Potential Confounding Effects.''  Journal of Econometrics 218, 609-632.
• Galbraith, J.W. and L. Iuliani (2019) ``Measures of Robustness for Networked Critical Infrastructure: an Empirical Comparison on Four Electrical Grids.'' International Journal of Critical Infrastructure Protection 27, 100326.
• Galbraith, J.W. and S. van Norden (2019) ``Asymmetry in Unemployment Rate Forecast Errors.'' International Journal of Forecasting 35, 1613-1626.