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When investors redeem their fund shares for cash, fixed-income fund managers can choose whether to draw on their liquid holdings or sell bonds in the secondary market. We analyze the liquidity-management decisions of Canadian corporate bond mutual funds, focusing on the strategies they use to meet investor redemptions.

We propose a new empirical framework that jointly decomposes the conditional variance of economic time series into a common and a sector-specific uncertainty component. We apply our framework to a disaggregated industrial production series for the US economy. We identify unexpected changes in durable goods uncertainty as drivers of downturns, while unexpected hikes in non-durable goods uncertainty are expansionary.

The early work of Tobin (1958) showed that portfolio allocation decisions can be reduced to a two stage process: first decide the relative allocation of assets across the risky assets, and second decide how to divide total wealth between the risky assets and the safe asset. This so called twofund separation relies on special assumptions on either returns or preferences.

In this paper, we measure, with Canadian data, the scope of the revisions to real-time estimates of the output gap generated with several univariate and multivariate techniques. We also make an empirical evaluation of the usefulness of the output gap estimates for predicting inflation.

The present paper shows that, everything else equal, some transactions to transfer portfolio credit risk to third-party investors increase the insolvency risk of banks. This is particularly likely if a bank sells the senior tranche and retains a sufficiently large first-loss position.

A database of historical Government of Canada zero-coupon yield curves developed at the Bank of Canada is introduced in this article, which also includes an initial statistical analysis of the behaviour and evolution of the zero-coupon interest (spot) rates over the full period and two distinct subperiods. Specific areas of interest include the evolution of the levels of key interest rates and yield-curve measures over the sample as well as daily changes in the key interest rates and the yield-curve measures; the identification of a relatively small number of factors that drove the evolution of the yield curve; and the total returns that would have been realized by holding bonds of different maturities for a given holding period.

This paper investigates the effects of the continuation of globalization and technological developments on the future of national-level financial markets and trading centres, particularly in smaller countries such as Canada. We foresee the development of a single global market in the most-liquid assets based on equity-market linkages.

Central banks conduct research involving in-depth interviews with external parties—but little is known about how this information affects monetary policy. We address this gap by analyzing open-ended interviews with senior central bank economic and policy staff who work closely with policy decision-makers.

In this paper, we empirically investigate whether multilateral adjustment to large U.S. external imbalances can help explain movements in the bilateral exchange rates of three commodity currencies – the Australian, Canadian and New Zealand (ACNZ) dollars.

This paper studies the effects of financial development, taking into account both formal and informal financing. Using cross-country firm-level data, we document that informal financing is utilized more by rich countries than poor countries.