Financial markets
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Euro Area Government Bonds—Integration and Fragmentation During the Sovereign Debt Crisis
The paper analyzes the integration of euro area sovereign bond markets during the European sovereign debt crisis. It tests for contagion (i.e., an intensification in the transmission of shocks across countries), fragmentation (a reduction in spillovers) and flight-to-quality patterns, exploiting the heteroskedasticity of intraday changes in bond yields for identification. -
Funding Liquidity, Market Liquidity and the Cross-Section of Stock Returns
Following theory, we check that funding risk connects illiquidity, volatility and returns in the cross-section of stocks. We show that the illiquidity and volatility of stocks increase with funding shocks, while contemporaneous returns decrease with funding shocks. -
Securitization under Asymmetric Information over the Business Cycle
This paper studies the efficiency of financial intermediation through securitization in a model with heterogeneous investment projects and asymmetric information about the quality of securitized assets. I show that when retaining part of the risk, the issuer of securitized assets may credibly signal its quality. -
High-Frequency Trading around Macroeconomic News Announcements: Evidence from the U.S. Treasury Market
This paper investigates high-frequency (HF) market and limit orders in the U.S. Treasury market around major macroeconomic news announcements. BrokerTec introduced i- Cross at the end of 2007 and we use this exogenous event as an instrument to analyze the impact of HF activities on liquidity and price efficiency. -
Persistent Leverage in Portfolio Sorts: An Artifact of Measurement Error?
Studies such as Lemmon, Roberts and Zender (2008) demonstrate how stable firms’ capital structures are over time, and raise the question of whether new theories of capital structure are needed to explain these phenomena. -
December 10, 2014
Exchange-Traded Funds: Evolution of Benefits, Vulnerabilities and Risks
Ian Foucher and Kyle Gray explain the different types of exchange-traded funds (ETFs), which present both benefits and risks for investors. They discuss ways in which the risk characteristics of certain ETF products could have broader implications for the financial system, and describe the evolution of ETF market structure and regulation in different jurisdictions as authorities try to mitigate risks related to ETFs. -
Bootstrap Tests of Mean-Variance Efficiency with Multiple Portfolio Groupings
We propose double bootstrap methods to test the mean-variance efficiency hypothesis when multiple portfolio groupings of the test assets are considered jointly rather than individually. -
November 13, 2014
The Use of Financial Derivatives by Canadian Firms
In Canada, about one-third of publicly listed non-financial firms use financial derivatives. The use of derivatives is widespread across all sectors of the economy and increases during periods of greater uncertainty. Non-financial firms that use derivatives are typically larger and more profitable and have lower volatility of earnings than those that do not use derivatives. Overall, the firm characteristics of Canadian hedgers seem to be consistent with those found in other jurisdictions. -
Credit Market Frictions and Sudden Stops
Financial crises in emerging economies in the 1980s and 1990s often entailed abrupt declines in foreign capital inflows, improvements in trade balance, and large declines in output and total factor productivity (TFP).