Until recently, there have been few efforts to systematically measure and aggregate the nominal value of the different types of sovereign government debt in default. To help fill this gap, the Bank of Canada’s Credit Rating Assessment Group (CRAG) has developed a comprehensive database of...

Existing studies using low-frequency data show that macroeconomic shocks contribute little to international stock market covariation. Those studies, however, do not account for the presence of asymmetric information, where sophisticated investors generate private information about the...

The authors model trading by foreign and domestic investors in developed-country equity markets. The key assumptions are that (i) both the foreign and domestic investor populations contain investors of different sophistication, and (ii) investor sophistication matters for performance in both...

The Bank of Canada is one of very few central banks that has made records of the intraday timing of its intervention operations available to researchers. The authors investigate the effectiveness of sterilized intervention in the Canadian dollar exchange rate market over the period January 1995...

The end result of major sporting events has been shown to affect next-day stock returns through shifts in investor mood. By studying the soccer matches that led to the elimination of France and Italy from the 2010 FIFA World Cup, we show that mood-related pricing effects can materialize as...

Differences in market structures may affect the manner in which fundamental information is incorporated into prices. High levels of quote and trade transparency plus substantial quoting obligations in European government securities markets ensure that prices are informationally efficient. The...

Measures have been taken by the Bank of Canada to increase the transparency of Canadian monetary policy. This paper examines whether the greater transparency has improved financial markets’ understanding of the conduct of monetary policy. In theory, it should result in reduced conditional...

Centralized exchange has a worst-case size-complexity many orders of magnitude lower than decentralized monetary exchange for the same number of agents and goods. A more rapid approach to competitive equilibrium may therefore be possible through centralized exchange. An additional benefit of...

Emerging market financial crises are abrupt and dramatic, usually occurring after a period of high output growth, massive capital flows, and a boom in asset markets. This paper develops an equilibrium asset pricing model with informational frictions in which vulnerability and the crisis itself...

In this paper we test whether volatility in six emerging markets has changed significantly over the period 1976:01-2002:03. This period corresponds to the years of more profound development of both the financial and the productive sides in emerging countries. We use alternative methodologies of...