A large body of empirical literature investigates differences in financing structures across firms. Private firms’ financing receives little attention due to the lack of data. Using administrative confidential data on the universe of Canadian corporate firms, we compare financing relationships...

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,...

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...

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...

This paper investigates the effect of oil price uncertainty on real economic activity using a quarterly VAR with stochastic volatility in mean. Stochastic volatility allows oil price uncertainty to vary separately from changes in the level of oil prices, and thus the impact of oil price...

The first step in designing effective policies to stabilize an economy is to understand business cycles. No country is isolated from the world economy and external shocks are becoming increasingly important. The author documents the sources of macroeconomic fluctuations in 22 emerging-market...

Recent empirical evidence suggests that private consumption is crowded-in by government spending. This outcome violates existing macroeconomic theory, according to which the negative wealth effect brought about by a rise in public expenditure should decrease consumption. In this paper, we...

This paper empirically investigates the possibility that the effects of shocks to output depend on the level of inflation. The analysis extends Elwood’s (1998) framework by incorporating in the model an inflation-threshold process that can potentially influence the stochastic properties of...