G - Financial Economics
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Credit Risk Transfer and Bank Insolvency Risk
The present paper shows that, everything else equal, some transactions to transfer portfolio credit risk to third-party investors increase the insolvency risk of banks. This is particularly likely if a bank sells the senior tranche and retains a sufficiently large first-loss position. -
Variance Premium, Downside Risk and Expected Stock Returns
We decompose total variance into its bad and good components and measure the premia associated with their fluctuations using stock and option data from a large cross-section of firms. -
Credit Crunches from Occasionally Binding Bank Borrowing Constraints
We present a model in which banks and other financial intermediaries face both occasionally binding borrowing constraints and costs of equity issuance. Near the steady state, these intermediaries can raise equity finance at no cost through retained earnings. -
Recent Evolution of Canada’s Credit-to-GDP Gap: Measurement and Interpretation
Over the past several years, the Bank for International Settlements has noted that Canada’s credit-to-GDP gap has widened and is above thresholds indicating future banking stress. -
A Barometer of Canadian Financial System Vulnerabilities
This note presents a composite indicator of Canadian financial system vulnerabilities—the Vulnerabilities Barometer. It aims to complement the Bank of Canada’s vulnerabilities assessment by adding a quantitative and synthesized perspective to the more granular (distributional) analysis presented in the Financial System Review. -
Risk-Neutral Moment-Based Estimation of Affine Option Pricing Models
This paper provides a novel methodology for estimating option pricing models based on risk-neutral moments. We synthesize the distribution extracted from a panel of option prices and exploit linear relationships between risk-neutral cumulants and latent factors within the continuous time affine stochastic volatility framework. -
What Drives Episodes of Settlement Fails in the Government of Canada Bond Market?
We study settlement fails for trades in the Government of Canada bond market. We find that settlement fails do not occur independently. Using a novel and comprehensive dataset, we examine three drivers of fails. -
Do Liquidity Proxies Measure Liquidity in Canadian Bond Markets?
This analytical note evaluates the reliability of proxies for measuring liquidity in Canadian bond markets. We find that price-impact and bid-ask proxies paint a similar picture of evolving liquidity conditions to that obtained from richer measures of liquidity for benchmark Government of Canada bonds. -
Good Volatility, Bad Volatility and Option Pricing
Advances in variance analysis permit the splitting of the total quadratic variation of a jump diffusion process into upside and downside components. Recent studies establish that this decomposition enhances volatility predictions, and highlight the upside/downside variance spread as a driver of the asymmetry in stock price distributions.