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...

A distinguishing feature of macro stress testing exercises is the use of macroeconomic models in scenario design and implementation. It is widely agreed that scenarios should be based on "rare but plausible" events that have either resulted in vulnerabilities in the past or could do so in the...

Stress testing, at its most general level, is an investigation of the performance of an entity under abnormal operating conditions. The authors focus on one set of entities--the Canadian banking sector--and investigate losses in the loans portfolio of this sector as a function of changing...

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...

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...

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...

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...

This paper calibrates a class of jump-diffusion long-run risks (LRR) models to quantify how well they can jointly explain the equity risk premium and the variance risk premium in the U.S. financial markets, and whether they can generate realistic dynamics of risk-neutral and realized...

The authors use the Financial Stress Index created by the International Monetary Fund to predict the likelihood of financial stress events for five developed countries: Canada, France, Germany, the United Kingdom and the United States. They use a semiparametric panel data model with...