G1 - General Financial Markets

• June 11, 2015

  Assessing Vulnerabilities in the Canadian Financial System

  Financial System Review - June 2015 Ian Christensen, Gitanjali Kumar, Césaire Meh, Lorie Zorn

  The authors present the four common cyclical vulnerabilities that appear in financial systems, providing examples of qualitative and quantitative indicators used to monitor these vulnerabilities across different sectors. They also discuss other inputs to the vulnerability assessment and to the internal process used at the Bank of Canada for identifying, evaluating and communicating vulnerabilities and risks, and highlight some of the key challenges in assessing financial system vulnerabilities and risks.

  Content Type(s): Publications, Financial System Review articles Topic(s): Financial stability JEL Code(s): G, G0, G01, G1, G10, G2, G20

• Testing for the Diffusion Matrix in a Continuous-Time Markov Process Model with Applications to the Term Structure of Interest Rates

  Staff Working Paper 2015-17 Fuchun Li

  The author proposes a test for the parametric specification of each component in the diffusion matrix of a d-dimensional diffusion process. Overall, d (d-1)/2 test statistics are constructed for the off-diagonal components, while d test statistics are constructed for the main diagonal components.

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Topic(s): Asset pricing, Econometric and statistical methods, Interest rates JEL Code(s): C, C1, C12, C14, E, E1, E17, E4, E43, G, G1, G12, G2, G20

• Exploring Differences in Household Debt Across Euro Area Countries and the United States

  Staff Working Paper 2015-16 Dimitris Christelis, Michael Ehrmann, Dimitris Georgarakos

  We use internationally comparable household-level data for ten euro area economies and the United States to investigate cross-country differences in debt holdings and the potential of debt overhang.

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Topic(s): Credit and credit aggregates, Econometric and statistical methods, International topics JEL Code(s): D, D1, D12, E, E2, E21, G, G1, G11

• Household Stockholding Behavior During the Great Financial Crisis

  Staff Working Paper 2015-15 Jie Zhou

  Using the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, this paper studies household stock market participation and trading behavior in 2007–09, a period that saw a major stock market downswing. The stock market participation rate fell after the market crash.

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Topic(s): Asset pricing, Financial markets JEL Code(s): G, G0, G01, G1, G11

• Euro Area Government Bonds—Integration and Fragmentation During the Sovereign Debt Crisis

  Staff Working Paper 2015-13 Michael Ehrmann, Marcel Fratzscher

  The paper analyzes the integration of euro area sovereign bond markets during the European sovereign debt crisis. It tests for contagion (i.e., an intensification in the transmission of shocks across countries), fragmentation (a reduction in spillovers) and flight-to-quality patterns, exploiting the heteroskedasticity of intraday changes in bond yields for identification.

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Topic(s): Asset pricing, Financial markets, Interest rates, International financial markets JEL Code(s): E, E5, F, F3, G, G1, G15

• Fourier Inversion Formulas for Multiple-Asset Option Pricing

  Staff Working Paper 2015-11 Bruno Feunou, Ernest Tafolong

  Plain vanilla options have a single underlying asset and a single condition on the payoff at the expiration date. For this class of options, a well-known result of Duffie, Pan and Singleton (2000) shows how to invert the characteristic function to obtain a closed-form formula for their prices.

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Topic(s): Asset pricing JEL Code(s): G, G1, G12

• Motivations for Capital Controls and Their Effectiveness

  Staff Working Paper 2015-5 Radhika Pandey, Gurnain Pasricha, Ila Patnaik, Ajay Shah

  We assess the motivations for changing capital controls and their effectiveness in India, a country with extensive and long-standing controls. We focus on the controls on foreign borrowing that can, in principle, be motivated by macroprudential concerns.

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Topic(s): Exchange rate regimes, Financial stability, Financial system regulation and policies, International topics JEL Code(s): F, F3, F32, G, G1, G15, G18