G1 - General Financial Markets

• An Empirical Analysis of Liquidity and Order Flow in the Brokered Interdealer Market for Government of Canada Bonds

  Staff Working Paper 2003-28 Chris D'Souza, Charles Gaa, Jing Yang

  The authors empirically measure Canadian bond market liquidity using a number of indicators proposed in the literature and detail, for the first time, price and trade dynamics in the Government of Canada secondary bond market. They find, consistent with Inoue (1999), that the Canadian brokered interdealer fixed-income market is relatively liquid for its size.

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Topic(s): Financial markets, Market structure and pricing JEL Code(s): G, G1, G10, G14

• Measuring Interest Rate Expectations in Canada

  Staff Working Paper 2003-26 Grahame Johnson

  Financial market expectations regarding future policy actions by the Bank of Canada are an important input into the Bank's decision-making process, and they can be measured using a variety of sources. The author develops a simple expectations-based model to focus on measuring interest rate expectations that are implied by the current level of money market yields.

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Topic(s): Financial markets, Interest rates JEL Code(s): G, G1

• Income Trusts - Understanding the Issues

  Staff Working Paper 2003-25 Michael R. King

  An income trust is an investment vehicle that distributes cash generated by a set of operating assets in a tax-efficient manner. The market capitalization of income trusts has grown rapidly over the past two years, reaching $45 billion at year-end 2002.

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Topic(s): Financial markets JEL Code(s): G, G1, G12, G3

• What Does the Risk-Appetite Index Measure?

  Staff Working Paper 2003-23 Miroslav Misina

  Explanations of changes in asset prices as being due to exogenous changes in risk appetite, although arguably controversial, have been popular in the financial community and have also received some attention in attempts to account for recent financial crises. Operational versions of these explanations are based on the assumption that changes in asset prices can be decomposed into a part that can be attributed to changes in riskiness and a part attributable to changes in risk aversion, and that some quantitative measure can capture these effects in isolation.

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Topic(s): Economic models, Financial markets JEL Code(s): G, G1, G12

• The U.S. Stock Market and Fundamentals: A Historical Decomposition

  Staff Working Paper 2003-20 David Dupuis, David Tessier

  The authors identify the fundamentals behind the dynamics of the U.S. stock market over the past 30 years. They specify a structural vector-error-correction model following the methodology of King, Plosser, Stock, and Watson (1991).

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Topic(s): Financial markets JEL Code(s): G, G1

• The Syndicated Loan Market: Developments in the North American Context

  Staff Working Paper 2003-15 Jim Armstrong

  The author describes the rapid development of the syndicated corporate loan market in the 1990s. He explores the historical forces that led to the development of the contemporary U.S. syndicated loan market, which is effectively a hybrid of the investment banking and commercial banking worlds.

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Topic(s): Financial institutions, Financial markets JEL Code(s): G, G1, G10, G2, G21

• An Index of Financial Stress for Canada

  Staff Working Paper 2003-14 Mark Illing, Ying Liu

  The authors develop an index of financial stress for the Canadian financial system. Stress is defined as the force exerted on economic agents by uncertainty and changing expectations of loss in financial markets and institutions.

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Topic(s): Financial institutions, Financial markets JEL Code(s): E, E5, G, G1, G10

• Collateral and Credit Supply

  Staff Working Paper 2003-11 Joseph Atta-Mensah

  The author examines the role of collateral in an environment where lenders and borrowers possess identical information and similar beliefs about its future value. Using option-pricing techniques, he shows that a secured loan contract is equivalent to a regular bond and an embedded option to the borrower to default.

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Topic(s): Credit and credit aggregates, Economic models JEL Code(s): E, E5, E51, G, G1, G11, G12, G13

• Valuation of Canadian- vs. U.S.-Listed Equity: Is There a Discount?

  Staff Working Paper 2003-6 Michael R. King, Dan Segal

  The authors examine how the valuation multiples assigned to the equity of Canadian-listed firms compare with the equity of comparable firms listed in the United States. They find that Canadian-listed firms trade at a discount to U.S.-listed firms across a range of valuation measures.

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Topic(s): Financial markets JEL Code(s): G, G1, G12, G15

• Shift Contagion in Asset Markets

  Staff Working Paper 2003-5 Toni Gravelle, Maral Kichian, James Morley

  The authors develop a new methodology to investigate how crises cause the relationship between financial variables to change. Two possible sources of increased co-movement between markets during high-variance episodes are considered: larger common shocks operating through standard market linkages, and a structural change in the propagation of shocks between markets, called "shift contagion."

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Topic(s): Econometric and statistical methods, Financial markets JEL Code(s): C, C3, C32, F, F4, F42, G, G1, G15