Staff working papers

Stress testing, at its most general level, is an investigation of the performance of an entity under abnormal operating conditions.

Surveys provide direct information on expectations, but only short histories are available at quarterly frequencies or for long-horizon expectations.

The authors show that debt and equity issuance are procyclical for most listed U.S. firms.

The authors show that the widening of a foreign firm's U.S. investor base and the improved information environment associated with cross-listing on a U.S. exchange each have a separately identifiable effect on a firm's valuation.

The authors use the efficient hedging methodology for optimal pricing and hedging of equity-linked life insurance contracts whose payoff depends on the performance of several risky assets.

The authors estimate a small monthly macroeconometric model (BEAM, for bonds, equity, and money) of the Canadian economy built around three cointegrating relationships linking financial and real variables over the 1975–2002 period.

The authors propose a monetary policy rule for the Terms-of-Trade Economic Model (ToTEM), the Bank of Canada's new projection and policy-analysis model for the Canadian economy.

The author quantitatively studies the interaction between education and occupation choices and its implication for the relationship between the changes in earnings inequality and the changes in wealth inequality in the United States over the 1983–2001 period.

The authors examine simultaneously the causal links connecting monetary policy variables, real activity, and stock returns.

The author develops a strategy for utilizing higher moments and conditioning information efficiently, and hence improves on the variance bounds computed by Hansen and Jagannathan (1991, the HJ bound) and Gallant, Hansen, and Tauchen (1990, the GHT bound).