Since the financial crisis, attention has focused on central counterparties (CCPs) as a solution to systemic risk for a variety of financial markets, ranging from repurchase agreements and options to swaps. However, internationally accepted standards and the academic literature have left...

This paper estimates the implied cost of equity for Canadian and U.S. firms using a methodology based on the dividend discount model and utilizing firms' current stock price and analysts' forecasted earnings. We find that firm size and firm stock liquidity are negatively related to cost of...

This paper calculates an implied cost of equity for 19 developed countries from 1991 to 2006. During this period, there has been a decline in the cost of equity of about 10-15 bps per year, which can be partially attributed to declining government yields and declining inflation. Analyst forecast...

According to the rent-extraction hypothesis, weak corporate governance allows entrenched CEOs to capture the pay-setting process and benefit from events outside of their control -- get paid for luck. In this paper, I find that the independence requirement imposed on boards of directors by the...

The literature on market timing of long-term debt issuance yields mixed evidence that managers can successfully time their debt-maturity issuance. The early results that are indicative of debt-maturity timing are not robust to accounting for structural breaks or to other measures of debt...

This paper examines Canadian and other foreign firms that have been involuntarily delisted from major U.S. exchanges. I find that, for most countries, less than 10% of firms get delisted from a U.S. exchange during my sample period. For Canada, more than 25% of firms listed in the United States...

An international initiative to increase the use of central clearing for OTC derivatives emerged as one of the reactions to the 2008 financial crisis. The move to central clearing is a fundamental change in the structure of the market. Central clearing will help control counterparty credit risk,...

This paper proposes a theoretical framework to analyze the relationship between credit shocks, firm defaults and volatility, and to study the impact of credit shocks on business cycle dynamics. Firms are identical ex ante but differ ex post due to different realizations of firm-specific...

The authors document leverage, capital and liquidity ratios of banks in Canada. These ratios are important indicators of different types of risk with respect to a bank’s balance-sheet management. Particular attention is given to the observations by different types of banks, including small...

This paper develops a model of settlement system to study the endogenous structure of settlement networks, and the welfare consequences of clearing agent failure. The equilibrium degree of tiering is endogenously determined by the cost structure and the information structure. The degree of...