Biography
Yang Zhang is a Senior Policy Director in the Canadian Economic Analysis department at the Bank of Canada, where she provides strategic direction on projection and model development activities and leadership on issues related to Canada's monetary policy mandate.
Throughout her career, Yang has accumulated broad expertise in macroeconomic modeling and monetary policy analysis. She has led efforts to develop and integrate state-of-the-art economic models for analyzing the Canadian economy and providing monetary policy advice. Her research on inflation dynamics, supply chains, unconventional monetary policies, and alternative expectation formations has directly informed policy analysis and contributed critical insights supporting the renewal of Canada's inflation-control agreement—including leading the Bank's landmark "Horse Race" evaluation of alternative monetary policy frameworks.
Yang's work sits at the frontier of complexity economics and central banking. She led the development of CANVAS, the first Canadian behavioral agent-based model used for monetary policy analysis, capturing how bounded rationality and household heterogeneity shape macroeconomic outcomes. She continues to lead the development of the Bank of Canada's next-generation monetary policy models, enhancing understanding of inflation dynamics to address post-pandemic challenges.
Beyond monetary economics, Yang conducts interdisciplinary research contributing to social good in areas such as health and economic equality, employing advanced computational methods including machine learning and artificial intelligence. Her work on AI-driven approaches to global climate cooperation and market-based climate finance mechanisms reflects INET's mission to develop new economic thinking for pressing global challenges.
Born in China, Yang holds a PhD in Economics from the University of Ottawa.
