Default rates are series commonly used in stress testing. In Canada, as in many other countries, there are no historical series available for sectoral default rates on bank loans to firms. Knowledge of such data is required to assess the impact of shocks on the balance sheets of financial...

In this paper, we define a financial institution’s contribution to financial systemic risk as the increase in financial systemic risk conditional on the crash of the financial institution. The higher the contribution is, the more systemically important is the institution for the system. Based...

We employ a comprehensive data set and a variety of methods to provide evidence on the magnitude of large banks’ funding advantage in Canada, and on the extent to which market discipline exists across different securities issued by the Canadian banks. The banking sector in Canada provides a...

We build a dynamic capital structure model to study the link between systematic risk exposure and debt maturity, as well as their joint impact on the term structure of credit spreads. Our model allows for time variation and lumpiness in the maturity structure. Relative to short-term debt,...

The recent crisis has underlined the importance of sound bank liquidity management. In response, regulators are devising new liquidity standards with the aim of making the financial system more stable and resilient. In this paper, the authors analyse the impact of liquid asset holdings on bank...

This paper explores the volatility forecasting implications of a model in which the friction in high-frequency prices is related to the true underlying volatility. The contribution of this paper is to propose a framework under which the realized variance may improve volatility forecasting if the...

This paper proposes new measures of the integrated variance, measures which use high-frequency bid-ask spreads and quoted depths. The traditional approach assumes that the mid-quote is a good measure of frictionless price. However, the recent high-frequency econometric literature takes the...

Observed high-frequency prices are contaminated with liquidity costs or market microstructure noise. Using such data, we derive a new asset return variance estimator inspired by the market microstructure literature to explicitly model the noise and remove it from observed returns before...

The objective of this paper is to propose an early warning system that can predict the likelihood of the occurrence of financial stress events within a given period of time. To achieve this goal, the signal extraction approach proposed by Kaminsky, Lizondo and Reinhart (1998) is used to monitor...

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...