David Bolder - Latest
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Combining Canadian Interest-Rate Forecasts
Model risk is a constant danger for financial economists using interest-rate forecasts for the purposes of monetary policy analysis, portfolio allocations, or risk-management decisions. Use of multiple models does not necessarily solve the problem as it greatly increases the work required and still leaves the question "which model forecast should one use?" -
June 20, 2008
The Canadian Debt-Strategy Model
In its role as fiscal agent to the government, the Bank of Canada provides analysis and advice on decisions about the government's domestic debt portfolio. Debt-management decisions depend on assumptions about future interest rates, macroeconomic outcomes, and fiscal policy, yet when a debt-strategy decision is taken, none of these factors can be known with certainty. Moreover, the government has various financing options (i.e., treasury bills, nominal bonds, and inflation-linked bonds) to meet its objectives of minimizing debt-service charges while simultaneously ensuring a prudent risk profile and well-functioning government securities markets. Bank of Canada staff have therefore developed a mathematical model to assist in the decision-making process. This article describes the key aspects of the debt manager's challenge and the principal assumptions incorporated in the debt-strategy model, illustrated with specific results. -
Examining Simple Joint Macroeconomic and Term-Structure Models: A Practitioner's Perspective
The primary objective of this paper is to compare a variety of joint models of the term structure of interest rates and the macroeconomy. -
Optimization in a Simulation Setting: Use of Function Approximation in Debt Strategy Analysis
The stochastic simulation model suggested by Bolder (2003) for the analysis of the federal government's debt-management strategy provides a wide variety of useful information. It does not, however, assist in determining an optimal debt-management strategy for the government in its current form. -
Modelling Term-Structure Dynamics for Risk Management: A Practitioner's Perspective
Modelling term-structure dynamics is an important component in measuring and managing the exposure of portfolios to adverse movements in interest rates. -
An Empirical Analysis of the Canadian Term Structure of Zero-Coupon Interest Rates
Zero-coupon interest rates are the fundamental building block of fixed-income mathematics, and as such have an extensive number of applications in both finance and economics. -
A Stochastic Simulation Framework for the Government of Canada's Debt Strategy
Debt strategy is defined as the manner in which a government finances an excess of government expenditures over revenues and any maturing debt issued in previous periods. The author gives a thorough qualitative description of the complexities of debt strategy analysis and then demonstrates that it is, in fact, a problem in stochastic optimal control. -
Exponentials, Polynomials, and Fourier Series: More Yield Curve Modelling at the Bank of Canada
This paper continues the work started by Bolder and Stréliski (1999) and considers two alternative classes of models for extracting zero-coupon and forward rates from a set of observed Government of Canada bond and treasury-bill prices. -
Towards a More Complete Debt Strategy Simulation Framework
An effective technique governments use to evaluate the desirability of different financing strategies involves stochastic simulation. This approach requires the postulation of the future dynamics of key macroeconomic variables and the use of those variables in the construction of a debt charge distribution for each individual financing strategy.