We examine the impact of the 2009 amendments to the Canadian Bankruptcy and Insolvency Act on insolvency decisions. Rule changes steered debtors out of division I proposals and into the more cost-effective division II proposals. This also led to a significant substitution out of bankruptcies and...

Following theory, we check that funding risk connects illiquidity, volatility and returns in the cross-section of stocks. We show that the illiquidity and volatility of stocks increase with funding shocks, while contemporaneous returns decrease with funding shocks. The dispersions of...

There is a close link between prices of equity options and the default probability of a firm. We show that in the presence of positive expected equity recovery, standard methods that assume zero equity recovery at default misestimate the option-implied default probability. We introduce a simple...

In this paper, we present a novel method to extract the risk-neutral probability of default of a firm from American put option prices. Building on the idea of a default corridor proposed in Carr and Wu (2011), we derive a parsimonious closed-form formula for American put option prices from which...

Global climate change is increasing the frequency and severity of natural disasters. We use detailed consumer credit data to investigate the impact of the 2016 Fort McMurray wildfire, the costliest wildfire disaster in Canadian history, on consumers' financial stress. We focus on the arrears of...

The stochastic simulation model suggested by Bolder (2003) for the analysis of the federal government's debt-management strategy provides a wide variety of useful information. It does not, however, assist in determining an optimal debt-management strategy for the government in its current form....

This paper contributes to the debate on fiscal multipliers, in the context of a structural model. I estimate a micro-founded dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model, that features a rich fiscal policy block and a transmission mechanism for government spending shocks, using Bayesian...

This paper studies an economy where agents can spend resources on consuming a private good and on funding a public good. There is asymmetric information regarding agents' relative preference for private versus public good consumption. I show how private good consumption should be coordinated...

We build an otherwise-standard business cycle model with housework, calibrated consistently with data on time use, in order to discipline consumption-hours complementarity and relate its strength to the size of fiscal multipliers. We show that if substitutability between home and market goods is...