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This paper assesses the effectiveness of Canada's official foreign exchange intervention in moderating intraday volatility of the Can$/US$ exchange rate, using a 2-1/2-year sample of 10-minute exchange rate data. The use of high frequency data (higher than daily frequency) should help in assessing the impact of intervention since the foreign exchange market is efficient and […]

With the elimination of the federal deficit, the Bank of Canada, the Department of Finance, and financial market participants are examining ways to manage the reduction in the stock of marketable debt. This paper summarizes three different methods—reverse auction, over-the-counter purchases, and conversions—that could be used to buy back Government of Canada bonds before they […]

The Department of Finance and the Bank of Canada, as its fiscal agent, work closely with financial market participants in the management of the federal government's debt program. From the government's perspective, maintaining a liquid well-functioning market in Government of Canada securities is a key factor in ensuring that debt-service costs are minimized. It is […]

The financial services industry has been undergoing significant change in recent years. This paper analyzes some key developments affecting the industry and examines some important issues facing the industry and its regulators.

This paper examines the major changes in the Canadian banking system since the Second World War, with special attention paid to the differences between Canadian and U.S. developments over this period.

This paper tests between fads and bubbles using a new empirical strategy (based on switching-regression econometrics) for distinguishing between competing asset-pricing models. By extending the Blanchard and Watson (1982) model, we show how stochastic bubbles can lead to regime-switching in stock market returns.

This paper uses regime-switching econometrics to study stock market crashes and to explore the ability of two very different economic explanations to account for historical crashes. The first explanation is based on historical accounts of "manias and panics."

Since the early 1980s, models based on economic fundamentals have been poor at explaining the movements in the exchange rate (Messe 1990). In response to this problem, Frankel and Froot (1988) developed a model that uses two approaches to forecast the exchange rate: the fundamentalist approach, which bases the forecast on economic fundamentals, and the chartist approach, which bases the forecast on the past behaviour of the exchange rate.

Futurists have been speculating about the prospects for a cashless society for many years, and such predictions became more frequent following the introduction of "smart" cards - cards containing a computer chip - in the mid-1970s.

In this report the author focusses on the microstructure of derivatives markets. While the primary objective is to examine derivatives markets in Canada, the author also discusses certain developments in global derivatives markets that are bound to influence the functioning and development of financial markets in a small, open economy such as Canada's. It is […]