Financial markets
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April 12, 2006
The Evolution of the Government of Canada's Debt Distribution Framework
This overview includes a brief history highlighting the government's use of the primary and secondary markets to develop a framework for distributing its debt securities to financial market intermediaries and end investors. The framework is also intended to meet the government's debt-strategy objectives of raising stable, low-cost funding and maintaining a well-functioning debt market. Pellerin reviews the government's adoption of a new framework in 1998 as well as the 2005 modifications aimed at attracting continued broad and competitive participation in government auctions. -
A Structural Error-Correction Model of Best Prices and Depths in the Foreign Exchange Limit Order Market
Traders using the electronic limit order book in the foreign exchange market can watch the posted price and depth of the best quotes change over the day. -
October 18, 2005
What Drives Movements in Exchange Rates?
Understanding what causes the exchange rate to move has been on ongoing challenge for economists. Despite extensive research, traditional macro models of exchange rate determination—with the exception of the Bank of Canada's exchange rate equation—have typically not fared well, motivating economists to explore new ways to model exchange rate movements that incorporate more complex and realistic settings. Within the context of the sharp appreciation of the Canadian dollar in 2003 and 2004, Bailliu and King review the macroeconomic models of exchange rates, as well as the micro-structure studies that highlight the importance of trading mechanisms, information asymmetry, and investor heterogeneity for explaining short-term dynamics in exchange rates. In addition to summarizing the current state of knowledge, they highlight recent advances and identify promising alternative approaches. -
Uninsured Idiosyncratic Production Risk with Borrowing Constraints
The author analyzes a general-equilibrium model of a heterogeneous agents economy in which the agents are subject to borrowing constraints and uninsurable idiosyncratic production risk. -
A Search Model of Venture Capital, Entrepreneurship, and Unemployment
The authors develop a search model of venture capital in which the number of successful matches of entrepreneurs and venture capitalists (VCs) at any moment in time is a function of the number of entrepreneurs searching for funds, the number of VCs searching for entrepreneurs, and the number of vacancies posted by each VC. -
The Effectiveness of Official Foreign Exchange Intervention in a Small Open Economy: The Case of the Canadian Dollar
The Bank of Canada is one of very few central banks that has made records of the intraday timing of its intervention operations available to researchers. -
June 22, 2005
Estimating the Impact of Monetary Policy Surprises on Fixed-Income Markets
In the interest of better understanding the impact of the Bank of Canada's policy actions on bond and bill yields, Andreou assesses the impact of policy-rate announcements on short and long bonds over the period 1996 to 2004. To aid the analysis, policy actions are decomposed into expected and surprise components. He also examines whether the introduction of fixed announcement dates (FADs) has affected these results, including markets' perceptions. The main finding is that unexpected policy actions by the Bank have a significant effect on market rates at the shorter end of the yield curve, with the effect dissipating as the maturity increases. A second finding, that the impact on longer-term interest rates of a surprise action by the Bank has diminished since the introduction of the FADs, suggests that the Bank's long-term policy goals are well understood and credible. -
Risk Perceptions and Attitudes
Changes in risk perception have been used in various contexts to explain shorter-term developments in financial markets, as part of a mechanism that amplifies fluctuations in financial markets, as well as in accounts of "irrational exuberance." -
State Dependence in Fundamentals and Preferences Explains Risk-Aversion Puzzle
The authors examine the ability of economic models with regime shifts to rationalize and explain the risk-aversion and pricing-kernel puzzles put forward in Jackwerth (2000).