The ongoing review of the IMF, initiated in 2005 by Managing Director De Rato, presents an excellent opportunity to re-examine the role, functions and governance of the Fund. In particular, the objective, scope and conduct of IMF surveillance have been identified as a key area for renewal. In...

Based on a new approach for measuring the comovements between stock market returns, we provide a nonparametric test for asymmetric comovements in the sense that stock market downturns will lead to stronger comovements than market upturns. The test is used to detect whether asymmetric comovements...

This paper studies the impact of international capital flows on asset prices through risk premia. We investigate whether foreign purchases of U.S. Treasury securities significantly contributed to the decline in excess returns on long-term bonds between 1995 and 2008. We run forecasting...

Using a new data set, we examine the characteristics and dynamics of cross-border mergers and acquisitions during emerging-market financial crises, that is, so-called "fire-sale FDI". Our findings shed fresh light on whether the transactions undertaken during crisis periods differ in fundamental...

This paper examines the role of bank credit in modeling and forecasting business cycle fluctuations, and investigates the international transmission of US credit shocks, using a global vector autoregressive (GVAR) framework and associated country-specific error correction models. The paper...

Commodity-equity and cross-commodity return co-movements rose dramatically after the 2008 financial crisis. This development took place following what has been dubbed the 'financialization' of commodity markets. We first document changes since 2000 in the intensity of speculative activity in...

This paper proposes a novel methodology for identifying episodes of strong capital flows based on a regime-switching model. In comparison with the existing literature, a key advantage of our methodology is to estimate capital flow regimes without the need for context- and sample-specific...

We measure systemic risk in the network of financial market infrastructures (FMIs) as the probability that two or more FMIs have a large credit risk exposure to the same FMI participant. We construct indicators of credit risk exposures in three main Canadian FMIs during the period 2007-11 and...

In August 2012, the New York Stock Exchange launched the Retail Liquidity Program (RLP), a trading facility that enables participating organizations to quote dark limit orders executable only by retail traders. A Hasbrouck (1991) structural vector autoregression shows that the facility increased...

This paper analyzes the implications of the global financial cycle for conventional and unconventional monetary policies and macroprudential policy in small, open economies such as Canada. The paper starts by summarizing recent work on financial cycles and their growing correlation across...