In this paper, we provide empirical evidence on the factors that motivated emerging economies to change their capital outflow controls in recent decades. Liberalization of capital outflow controls can allow emerging-market economies (EMEs) to reduce net capital inflow (NKI) pressures, but may...

Until recently, there have been few efforts to systematically measure and aggregate the nominal value of the different types of sovereign government debt in default. To help fill this gap, the Bank of Canada’s Credit Rating Assessment Group (CRAG) has developed a comprehensive database of...

As part of managing a debt portfolio, debt managers face the challenging task of choosing a strategy that minimizes the cost of debt, subject to limitations on risk. The Bank of Canada provides debt-management analysis and advice to the Government of Canada to assist in this task, with the...

The authors describe the liabilities model of the Exchange Fund Account (EFA). The EFA is managed using an asset-liability matching framework that requires currency and duration matching of both sides of the balance sheet. The model chooses the mix of liabilities across instruments and tenors...

Affine models describe the stylized time-series properties of the term structure of interest rates in a reasonable manner, they generalize relatively easily to higher dimensions, and a vast academic literature exists relating to their implementation. This combination of characteristics makes the...

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,...

The authors contrast the impact of two sources of information flow on the volatility of prices, trading activity, and liquidity in the brokered interdealer market for Government of Canada bonds. Liquidity varies with the amount of asymmetric information in the market, and order flow plays a...

Domestic public debt issued by emerging markets has risen significantly relative to international debt in recent years. Some recent empirical evidence also suggests that sovereigns have defaulted differentially on debt held by domestic and external creditors. Standard models of sovereign debt,...

Two models of default risk are prominent in the financial literature: Merton's structural model and Altman's non-structural model. Merton's structural model has the benefit of being responsive, since the probabilities of default can continually be updated with the evolution of firms' asset...