We use a method similar to Google’s PageRank procedure to rank banks in the Canadian Large Value Transfer System (LVTS). Along the way we obtain estimates of the payment processing speeds for the individual banks. These differences in processing speeds are essential for explaining why observed...

Recently, economists have argued that a bank’s importance within the financial system depends not only on its individual characteristics but also on its position within the banking network. A bank is deemed to be “central” if, based on our network analysis, it is predicted to hold the most...

In the Canadian large value payment system an important goal is to understand how liquidity is transferred through the system and hence how efficient the system is in settling payments. Understanding the structure of the underlying network of relationships between participants in the payment...

Why should risk management systems account for parameter uncertainty? In order to answer this question, this paper lets an investor in a credit portfolio face non-diversifiable estimation-driven uncertainty about two parameters: probability of default and asset-return correlation. Bayesian...

We study loans from banking and non-banking lenders to different groups of borrowers in order to unveil significant differences on how those respond to a shock and evaluate possible alternative explanations for such differences. The objective is to gain insights useful to explain the loan...

We take a closer look at the question of whether dual traders in futures markets are indeed informed traders. Underpinning this question is the intuition that a dual trader's decision to trade on his own account is not random, but is endogenously determined by his expectations of trading profits...

Using audit trail transaction data compiled by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), we seek to ascertain directly the motives behind dual traders' own account trading and whether or not they are informed traders. We estimate our system of equations on each of the 101 most active dual...

The short-term movements of a security price reflect the latent efficient price (conditional expectation of terminal value) and also components arising from the trading mechanism itself. Observed bid and ask quotes are but rough signals of these unobserved quantities. The bid and ask quotes in...

We present and estimate a Bayesian Hierarchical model of mutual fund returns. In our model, a fund's alpha reflects not only that fund's return history, but also information from other fund returns. Because parameters are estimated simultaneously for all funds, we can identify common residual...

This paper utilizes a Bayesian hierarchical model to study the distribution of skill (alphas) among mutual funds. The hierarchical model specifies a probability distribution over all parameters and funds, making it possible to formally analyze the variability of alphas across funds. In addition,...