G1 - General Financial Markets
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Greater Transparency in Monetary Policy: Impact on Financial Markets
Measures have been taken by the Bank of Canada to increase the transparency of Canadian monetary policy. This paper examines whether the greater transparency has improved financial markets' understanding of the conduct of monetary policy. -
Liquidity of the Government of Canada Securities Market: Stylized Facts and Some Market Microstructure Comparisons to the United States Treasury Market
The aims of this study are to examine how liquidity in the Government of Canada securities market has evolved over the 1990s and to determine what factors influence the level of liquidity in this market, with some comparisons to the U.S. Treasury securities market. We find empirical support for the hypothesis that an increase in […] -
Uncovering Inflation Expectations and Risk Premiums From Internationally Integrated Financial Markets
Theory and empirical evidence suggest that the term structure of interest rates reflects risk premiums as well as market expectations about future inflation and real interest rates. We propose an approach to extracting such premiums and expectations by exploiting both the comovements among interest rates across the yield curve and between two countries, Canada and […] -
An Intraday Analysis of the Effectiveness of Foreign Exchange Intervention
This paper assesses the effectiveness of Canada's official foreign exchange intervention in moderating intraday volatility of the Can$/US$ exchange rate, using a 2-1/2-year sample of 10-minute exchange rate data. The use of high frequency data (higher than daily frequency) should help in assessing the impact of intervention since the foreign exchange market is efficient and […] -
Buying Back Government Bonds: Mechanics and Other Considerations
With the elimination of the federal deficit, the Bank of Canada, the Department of Finance, and financial market participants are examining ways to manage the reduction in the stock of marketable debt. This paper summarizes three different methods—reverse auction, over-the-counter purchases, and conversions—that could be used to buy back Government of Canada bonds before they […] -
Easing Restrictions on the Stripping and Reconstitution of Government of Canada Bonds
The Department of Finance and the Bank of Canada, as its fiscal agent, work closely with financial market participants in the management of the federal government's debt program. From the government's perspective, maintaining a liquid well-functioning market in Government of Canada securities is a key factor in ensuring that debt-service costs are minimized. It is […] -
Fads or Bubbles?
This paper tests between fads and bubbles using a new empirical strategy (based on switching-regression econometrics) for distinguishing between competing asset-pricing models. By extending the Blanchard and Watson (1982) model, we show how stochastic bubbles can lead to regime-switching in stock market returns. -
Speculative Behaviour, Regime-Switching and Stock Market Crashes
This paper uses regime-switching econometrics to study stock market crashes and to explore the ability of two very different economic explanations to account for historical crashes. The first explanation is based on historical accounts of "manias and panics." -
Switching Between Chartists and Fundamentalists: A Markov Regime-Switching Approach
Since the early 1980s, models based on economic fundamentals have been poor at explaining the movements in the exchange rate (Messe 1990). In response to this problem, Frankel and Froot (1988) developed a model that uses two approaches to forecast the exchange rate: the fundamentalist approach, which bases the forecast on economic fundamentals, and the chartist approach, which bases the forecast on the past behaviour of the exchange rate.