Staff working papers

In the months preceding the failure of Lehman Brothers in September 2008, banks were willing to pay a premium over the Federal Reserve’s discount window (DW) rate to participate in the much less flexible Term Auction Facility (TAF). We empirically test the predictions of a new signalling model that offers a rationale for offering two different liquidity facilities.

Recent years have witnessed the advances of e-money systems such as Bitcoin, PayPal and various forms of stored-value cards. This paper adopts a mechanism design approach to identify some essential features of different payment systems that implement and improve the constrained optimal resource allocation.

We analyze data from 2005 through 2009 that uniquely identify categories of traders to assess how speculators such as hedge funds and swap dealers relate to volatility and price changes. Examining various subperiods where price trends are strong, we find little evidence that speculators destabilize financial markets.

Central banks may face challenges in achieving their price stability goals when financial stability risks are present. There is, however, considerable heterogeneity among central banks with respect to how they manage these potential trade-offs.

There is widespread agreement that, in the United States, higher house prices raise consumption via collateral or possibly wealth effects. The presence of similar channels in Canada would have important implications for monetary policy transmission.

Under very general conditions, the total quadratic variation of a jump-diffusion process can be decomposed into diffusive volatility and squared jump variation. We use this result to develop a new option valuation model in which the underlying asset price exhibits volatility and jump intensity dynamics.

Emerging-market economies have become increasingly important in driving global GDP growth over the past 10 to 15 years. This has made timely and accurate assessment of current and future economic activity in emerging markets important for policy-makers not only in these countries but also in advanced economies.

Using a novel data set on capital control actions in 17 emerging-market economies (EMEs) over the period 2001–11, we provide new evidence on domestic and multilateral (or spillover) effects of capital controls.

We decompose the variance risk premium into upside and downside variance risk premia. These components reflect market compensation for changes in good and bad uncertainties. Their difference is a measure of the skewness risk premium (SRP), which captures asymmetric views on favorable versus undesirable risks.

This paper considers a real business cycle model with labor search frictions where two types of incentive pay are explicitly introduced following the insights from the micro literature on performance pay (e.g. Lazear, 1986).