Payment services offered by non-banks have flourished in recent years. The author provides an overview of the different kinds of non-bank retail payments schemes currently available in Canada, illustrating each by focusing on a specific example. Current players in the Canadian marketplace...

Recent events, such as the East Asian, Mexican, Scandinavian, and Argentinian crises, have sparked considerable interest in exploring how shocks experienced by one country can spread vis-à-vis real and nominal links to other countries' banking systems. Given the large costs associated with...

Banks reliance on short-term funding has increased over time. While an effective source of financing in good times, the 2007 financial crisis has exposed the vulnerability of banks and ultimately firms to such a liability structure. The authors show that banks that relied most on wholesale...

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...

A "sunspot" is a variable that has no direct impact on the economy’s fundamental condition, such as preferences, endowments or technologies, but may nonetheless affect economic outcomes through the expectations channel as a coordination device. This paper investigates how people react to...

We analyze trading dynamics as successive high-frequency trading (HFT) firms begin to trade stocks in an equity market. Entrants compete with incumbents for volume, and there is crowding out. Earlier entry is associated with larger effects. After Passive HFT entry, incumbent spreads tighten....

We conduct experiments with human subjects in a model with a positive production externality in which productivity is a non-decreasing function of the average level of employment of other firms. The model has three steady states: the low and high steady states are expectationally stable...

This paper studies the efficiency of financial intermediation through securitization in a model with heterogeneous investment projects and asymmetric information about the quality of securitized assets. I show that when retaining part of the risk, the issuer of securitized assets may credibly...

Recent reform proposals call for an elimination of the constant net asset value (NAV) or “buck” in money market mutual funds to reduce the occurrence of runs. Outside the United States, there are several countries that have money market mutual funds with and without constant NAVs. Using...