Cash-futures basis trading has grown alongside the Government of Canada bond futures market. We examine this growth over time in relation to Government of Canada bond and repurchase agreement markets and provide details on the type of market participants that engage in this type of trading activity.
We study liquidity requirements in a framework with fire sales. The framework nests three common pricing mechanisms and produces the same observables. Absent risk-sharing considerations, the equilibrium is efficient with cash-in-the-market pricing; a liquidity requirement is optimal with second-best-use pricing; and a liquidity ceiling (i.e., a cap on liquid assets) is optimal with adverse selection.
We examine how life insurers manage liquidity risks created by their business model. We find that Canadian life insurers did not face significant liquidity draws and continued their usual investment behaviour during the COVID-19 crisis and as interest rates increased in 2022.
From the autumn of 2023 into early 2024, the Canadian Overnight Repo Rate Average (CORRA), a measure of the cost of overnight general collateral Canadian dollar repos, was consistently well above the Bank’s target for the overnight rate. We find that, among several factors, long bond positions that require repo financing are the main driver of the recent upward pressure on CORRA.
We examine how intermediary capitalization affects asset prices in a framework that allows for intermediary market power. We introduce a model in which capital-constrained intermediaries buy or trade an asset in an imperfectly competitive market, and we show that weaker capital constraints lead to both higher prices and intermediary markups.
We introduce generalized autoregressive gamma (GARG) processes, a class of autoregressive and moving-average processes in which each conditional moment dynamic is driven by a different and identifiable moving average of the variable of interest. We show that using GARG processes reduces pricing errors by substantially more than using existing autoregressive gamma processes does.
While Government of Canada bond transactions of hedge funds are typically in the opposite direction to those of other market participants, during the peak period of market turmoil in March 2020, hedge funds sold these bonds, just as other market participants did. This shows that hedge funds can at times contribute to one-sided markets and amplify declines in market liquidity.
We study whether the credit derivatives of firms reflect the risk from climate transition. We find that climate transition risk has asymmetric and significant economic impacts on the credit risk of more vulnerable firms, and negligible effects on other firms.
We use bid data from Government of Canada bond auctions between 1999 and 2021 to gauge the yield sensitivity of these bonds to the issuance amount. Our new metric estimates the demand function of the bidders at each auction and offers insights into the relationship between supply and yield of government bonds.