Building on the growing evidence on the importance of large data sets for empirical macroeconomic modeling, we use a factor-augmented VAR (FAVAR) model with more than 260 series for 20 OECD countries to analyze how global developments affect the Canadian economy. We focus on several sources of...

This paper studies discounting in mortgage markets. Using transaction-level data on Canadian mortgages, we document that over time there’s been an increase in the average discount, along with substantial dispersion. The standard explanation for dispersion in credit markets is that lenders...

Existing studies show that U.S. Treasury bond price changes are mainly driven by public information shocks, as manifested in macroeconomic news announcements and events. The literature also shows that heterogeneous private information contributes significantly to price discovery for U.S....

In this paper, I extend the results of Moskowitz and Vissing-Jørgensen (2002) on the returns to entrepreneurial investments in the United States. First, following the authors’ methodology I replicate the original findings from the Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF) for the period 1989–1998...

This paper contributes to the debate on fiscal multipliers, in the context of a structural model. I estimate a micro-founded dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model, that features a rich fiscal policy block and a transmission mechanism for government spending shocks, using Bayesian...

This paper uses Latent Semantic Analysis to extract information from Bank of Canada communication statements and investigates what type of information affects returns and volatility in short-term as well as long-term interest rate markets over the 2002-2008 period. Discussions about geopolitical...

We propose alternative single-equation semi-structural models for forecasting inflation in Canada, whereby structural New Keynesian models are combined with time-series features in the data. Several marginal cost measures are used, including one that in addition to unit labour cost also...

We survey several key mechanisms that explain the composition of international capital flows: foreign direct investment, foreign portfolio investment and debt flows (bank loans and bonds). In particular, we focus on the following market frictions: asymmetric information in capital markets and...

This paper finds a strong empirical link between domestic banking sector competitiveness and de facto international integration. De-facto international integration is measured through a new index of financial integration, which measures, for deviations from covered interest parity, the size of...

This paper studies the interaction between adverse selection, liquidity risk and beliefs about systemic risk in determining market liquidity, asset prices and welfare. Even a small amount of adverse selection in the asset market can lead to fire-sale pricing and possibly to a market breakdown if...