An effective pension system enhances economic and financial efficiency. A majority of pension plans in Canada are defined-benefit (DB) plans, but DB plans are under stress from increasing longevity, low long-term interest rates, and the shrinking equity premium. DB plans are vulnerable to such...

This paper documents a link between the real and financial sides of the economy. We find that retail equity mutual fund flows in Canada are negatively related to current and past changes in a component of the prime and 5-year mortgage rates that is uncorrelated with government rates. The effect...

This paper investigates the effects of monetary policy on the risk-taking behavior of fixed-income mutual funds in Canada. We consider different measures of the stance of monetary policy and investigate active variation in mutual funds’ risk exposure in response to monetary policy. We find...

This paper provides a framework to compare linked and unlinked CCP configurations in terms of total netting achieved by market participants and the total system default exposures that exist between participants and CCPs. A total system perspective, taking both market participant and CCP...

The authors develop an index of financial stress for the Canadian financial system. Stress is defined as the force exerted on economic agents by uncertainty and changing expectations of loss in financial markets and institutions. It is a continuous variable with a spectrum of values, where...

There currently exists in the literature several continuous-time one-factor models for short-term interest rates. This paper considers a wide range of these models that are nested into one general model. These models are approximated using both a discrete-time model and a model that accounts for...

This study examines the impact of increased transparency, brought about by the introduction of three electronic trading systems, on the brokered interdealer market for Government of Canada benchmark securities. Using the CanPX dataset for the 2-, 5-, 10-, and 30-year benchmarks, the paper finds...

The author describes the rapid development of the syndicated corporate loan market in the 1990s. He explores the historical forces that led to the development of the contemporary U.S. syndicated loan market, which is effectively a hybrid of the investment banking and commercial banking worlds....

In this paper, the author uses structural vector autoregression methodology to decompose U.S. nominal interest rates into an expected inflation component and an ex ante real interest rate component.

We examine nine changes in the New York State Security Transaction Taxes (STT) between 1932 and 1981. We find that imposing or increasing an STT results in wider bidask spreads, lower volume, and increased price impact of trades. In contrast to theories of STT imposition as a means to reduce...