Search

The Boc–BoE database of sovereign debt defaults, published and updated annually by the Bank of Canada and the Bank of England, provides comprehensive estimates of stocks of government obligations in default. The 2020 edition includes a new section examining the scale of domestic arrears in 2018.

We quantify the reaction of U.S. equity, bond futures, and exchange rate returns to oil price shocks driven by oil inventory news.

This paper proposes a theory of foreign reserves as macroprudential policy. We study an open-economy model of financial crises in which pecuniary externalities lead to overborrowing, and show that by accumulating international reserves, the government can achieve the constrained-efficient allocation.

Using highly disaggregated transaction-level trade data, we document the importance of new firm-level trade partner relationships and the addition of new products to existing relationships in driving aggregate trade flows.

We identify a few Bank of Canada press releases that had the largest immediate impact on the exchange rate market. We find that volatility increases after these releases, but the effect is short-lived and mostly dissipates after the first hour, on average. Beyond the first hour, the size of the effect is similar to what we observe for other economic releases, such as those for inflation or economic growth data.

Can macroprudential foreign exchange (FX) regulations on banks reduce the financial and macroeconomic vulnerabilities created by borrowing in foreign currency? To evaluate the effectiveness and unintended consequences of macroprudential FX regulations, we develop a parsimonious model of bank and market lending in domestic and foreign currency and derive four predictions.

We propose an uncovered expected returns parity (URP) condition for the bilateral spot exchange rate. URP implies that unilateral exchange rate equations are misspecified and that equity returns also affect exchange rates. Fama regressions provide evidence that URP is statistically preferred to uncovered interest rate parity (UIP) for nominal bilateral exchange rates between the US dollar and six countries (Australia, Canada, Japan, Norway, Switzerland and the UK) at the monthly frequency.

We draw a parallel between the dramatic increases of systematic variations in exchange rates and international bank lending. We find that when a country’s currency has a larger share of systematic variations, lending flows by international banks to that country become more sensitive to global lending - they also become more systematic. This parallel is particularly prevalent for large commodity exporters, including Canada. Global financial intermediation may open a new channel between the real economy and exchange rates.

We investigate competition between two intrinsically worthless currencies as a result of decentralized interactions between human subjects. We design a laboratory experiment based on a simple two-country, two-currency search model to study factors that affect circulation patterns and equilibrium selection.

We use relative value to measure limits to arbitrage in fixed-income markets. Relative value captures apparent deviations from no-arbitrage relationships. It is simple, intuitive and can be computed model-free for any bond.