Staff working papers

• Short Changed? The Market's Reaction to the Short Sale Ban of 2008

  Staff Working Paper 2009-23 Louis Gagnon, Jonathan Witmer

  Do short sales restrictions have an impact on security prices? We address this question in the context of a natural experiment surrounding the short sale ban of 2008 using a comprehensive sample of Canadian stocks cross-listed in the U.S.

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Topic(s): Financial markets, International topics JEL Code(s): F, F3, F30, G, G0, G01, G1, G18, G2, G20

• Productivity, the Terms of Trade, and the Real Exchange Rate: The Balassa-Samuelson Hypothesis Revisited

  Staff Working Paper 2009-22 Ehsan U. Choudhri, Lawrence L. Schembri

  The paper examines how the Balassa-Samuelson hypothesis is affected by a modern variation of the standard model that allows product differentiation (within the traded and nontraded goods sectors) with the number of firms determined exogenously or endogenously.

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Topic(s): Exchange rates, Productivity JEL Code(s): F, F3, F31, F4, F41

• Structural Inflation Models with Real Wage Rigidities: The Case of Canada

  Staff Working Paper 2009-21 Jean-Marie Dufour, Lynda Khalaf, Maral Kichian

  Real wage rigidities have recently been proposed as a way of building intrinsic persistence in inflation within the context of New Keynesian Phillips Curves. Using two recent illustrative structural models, we evaluate empirically the importance of real wage rigidities in the data and the extent to which such models provide useful information regarding price stickiness.

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Topic(s): Econometric and statistical methods, Inflation and prices, Labour markets JEL Code(s): C, C1, C13, C5, C52, E, E3, E31

• The Equity Premium and the Volatility Spread: The Role of Risk-Neutral Skewness

  Staff Working Paper 2009-20 Bruno Feunou, Jean-Sébastien Fontaine, Roméo Tedongap

  We introduce the Homoscedastic Gamma [HG] model where the distribution of returns is characterized by its mean, variance and an independent skewness parameter under both measures. The model predicts that the spread between historical and risk-neutral volatilities is a function of the risk premium and of skewness.

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Topic(s): Financial markets JEL Code(s): G, G1, G12, G13

• Structural Multi-Equation Macroeconomic Models: Identification-Robust Estimation and Fit

  Staff Working Paper 2009-19 Jean-Marie Dufour, Lynda Khalaf, Maral Kichian

  Weak identification is likely to be prevalent in multi-equation macroeconomic models such as in dynamic stochastic general equilibrium setups. Identification difficulties cause the breakdown of standard asymptotic procedures, making inference unreliable.

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Topic(s): Econometric and statistical methods, Inflation and prices JEL Code(s): C, C5, C52, C53, E, E3, E37

• Simulations du ratio du service de la dette des consommateurs en utilisant des données micro

  Staff Working Paper 2009-18 Ramdane Djoudad

  The author constructs a formal analytic framework to simulate the impact of various economic shocks on the household debt-service ratio, using data from the Canadian Financial Monitor (CFM) survey.

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Topic(s): Econometric and statistical methods, Financial stability JEL Code(s): C, C1, C15, C3, C31, D, D1, D14, E, E5, E51

• Adopting Price-Level Targeting under Imperfect Credibility in ToTEM

  Staff Working Paper 2009-17 Gino Cateau, Oleksiy Kryvtsov, Malik Shukayev, Alexander Ueberfeldt

  Using the Bank of Canada's main projection and policy-analysis model, ToTEM, this paper measures the welfare gains of switching from inflation targeting to price-level targeting under imperfect credibility. Following the policy change, private agents assign a probability to the event that the policy-maker will revert to inflation-targeting next period.

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Topic(s): Monetary policy framework, Monetary policy implementation JEL Code(s): E, E3, E31, E5, E52

• Real Effects of Price Stability with Endogenous Nominal Indexation

  Staff Working Paper 2009-16 Césaire Meh, Vincenzo Quadrini, Yaz Terajima

  We study a model with repeated moral hazard where financial contracts are not fully indexed to inflation because nominal prices are observed with delay as in Jovanovic & Ueda (1997).

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Topic(s): Economic models, Financial markets, Monetary policy framework, Monetary policy transmission JEL Code(s): E, E2, E21, E3, E31, E4, E44, E5, E52

• Heterogeneous Beliefs and Housing-Market Boom-Bust Cycles in a Small Open Economy

  Staff Working Paper 2009-15 Hajime Tomura

  This paper introduces heterogeneous beliefs among households in a small open economy model for the Canadian economy. The model suggests that simultaneous boom-bust cycles in house prices, output, investment, consumption and hours worked emerge when credit-constrained mortgage borrowers expect that future house prices will rise and this expectation is neither shared by savers nor realized ex-post.

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Topic(s): Credit and credit aggregates, Financial stability, Inflation targets JEL Code(s): E, E4, E44, E5, E52

• Testing for Financial Contagion with Applications to the Canadian Banking System

  Staff Working Paper 2009-14 Fuchun Li

  The author proposes a new test for financial contagion based on a non-parametric measure of the cross-market correlation. The test does not depend on the assumption that the data are drawn from a given probability distribution; therefore, it allows for maximal flexibility in fitting into the data.

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Topic(s): Central bank research, Econometric and statistical methods, Financial stability JEL Code(s): C, C1, C12, G, G0, G01, G1, G15