L1 - Market Structure, Firm Strategy, and Market Performance
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No Double Standards: Quantifying the Impact of Standard Harmonization on Trade
Product standards are omnipresent in industrialized societies. Though standardization can be beneficial for domestic producers, divergent product standards have been categorized as a major obstacle to international trade. This paper quantifies the effect of standard harmonization on trade flows and characterizes the extent to which it changes the cost and demand structure of exporting. -
Explaining the Interplay Between Merchant Acceptance and Consumer Adoption in Two-Sided Markets for Payment Methods
Recent consumer and merchant surveys show a decrease in the use of cash at the point of sale. Increasingly, consumers and merchants have access to a growing array of payment innovations as substitutes for cash. -
Inference in Games Without Nash Equilibrium: An Application to Restaurants’ Competition in Opening Hours
This paper relaxes the Bayesian Nash equilibrium (BNE) assumption commonly imposed in empirical discrete choice games with incomplete information. Instead of assuming that players have unbiased/correct expectations, my model treats a player’s belief about the behavior of other players as an unrestricted unknown function. I study the joint identification of belief and payoff functions. -
The Scale and Scope of Online Retail
This paper studies the growth of online retail over the period 1999–2012, using confidential firm-product-level data for Canada. The revenue of online retailers is decomposed into the contributions of product scope (the number of product categories) and product scale (average revenue per product category). -
Customer Liquidity Provision in Canadian Bond Markets
This analytical note assesses the prevalence of liquidity provision by institutional investors in Canadian bonds. We find that the practice is not prevalent in Canada. Customer liquidity provision is more prevalent for less liquid bonds, on days when liquidity is already expensive or when there are larger trading volumes. In our interpretation, Canadian dealers draw on customer liquidity as a supplementary source of liquidity and only when necessary, given its cost. -
High-Frequency Trading and Institutional Trading Costs
Using data on Canadian bond futures, we examine how high-frequency traders (HFTs) interact with institutions building large positions. In contrast to recent findings, we find HFTs in the data act as small-sized liquidity suppliers, and we reject the hypothesis that they engage in back running, a predatory trading strategy. -
What Drives Episodes of Settlement Fails in the Government of Canada Bond Market?
We study settlement fails for trades in the Government of Canada bond market. We find that settlement fails do not occur independently. Using a novel and comprehensive dataset, we examine three drivers of fails. -
Do Canadian Broker-Dealers Act as Agents or Principals in Bond Trading?
Technology, risk tolerance and regulation may influence dealers to reduce their trading as principals (using their own balance sheets for sales and purchases of securities) in favour of agency trading (matching client trades). -
Fintech: Is This Time Different? A Framework for Assessing Risks and Opportunities for Central Banks
We investigate the risks and opportunities to the mandates of central banks arising from fintech developments.