Income Trusts - Understanding the Issues Staff Working Paper 2003-25 Michael R. King An income trust is an investment vehicle that distributes cash generated by a set of operating assets in a tax-efficient manner. The market capitalization of income trusts has grown rapidly over the past two years, reaching $45 billion at year-end 2002. Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Topic(s): Financial markets JEL Code(s): G, G1, G12, G3
Essays on Financial Stability Technical Report No. 95 John Chant, Alexandra Lai, Mark Illing, Fred Daniel The four essays published here provide a useful overview for anyone interested in understanding the issues and policy environment surrounding financial system stability. Content Type(s): Staff research, Technical reports Topic(s): Financial institutions, Financial markets JEL Code(s): G, G2, G28
What Does the Risk-Appetite Index Measure? Staff Working Paper 2003-23 Miroslav Misina Explanations of changes in asset prices as being due to exogenous changes in risk appetite, although arguably controversial, have been popular in the financial community and have also received some attention in attempts to account for recent financial crises. Operational versions of these explanations are based on the assumption that changes in asset prices can be decomposed into a part that can be attributed to changes in riskiness and a part attributable to changes in risk aversion, and that some quantitative measure can capture these effects in isolation. Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Topic(s): Economic models, Financial markets JEL Code(s): G, G1, G12
The U.S. Stock Market and Fundamentals: A Historical Decomposition Staff Working Paper 2003-20 David Dupuis, David Tessier The authors identify the fundamentals behind the dynamics of the U.S. stock market over the past 30 years. They specify a structural vector-error-correction model following the methodology of King, Plosser, Stock, and Watson (1991). Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Topic(s): Financial markets JEL Code(s): G, G1
The Syndicated Loan Market: Developments in the North American Context Staff Working Paper 2003-15 Jim Armstrong The author describes the rapid development of the syndicated corporate loan market in the 1990s. He explores the historical forces that led to the development of the contemporary U.S. syndicated loan market, which is effectively a hybrid of the investment banking and commercial banking worlds. Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Topic(s): Financial institutions, Financial markets JEL Code(s): G, G1, G10, G2, G21
An Index of Financial Stress for Canada Staff Working Paper 2003-14 Mark Illing, Ying Liu The authors develop an index of financial stress for the Canadian financial system. Stress is defined as the force exerted on economic agents by uncertainty and changing expectations of loss in financial markets and institutions. Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Topic(s): Financial institutions, Financial markets JEL Code(s): E, E5, G, G1, G10
Collateral and Credit Supply Staff Working Paper 2003-11 Joseph Atta-Mensah The author examines the role of collateral in an environment where lenders and borrowers possess identical information and similar beliefs about its future value. Using option-pricing techniques, he shows that a secured loan contract is equivalent to a regular bond and an embedded option to the borrower to default. Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Topic(s): Credit and credit aggregates, Economic models JEL Code(s): E, E5, E51, G, G1, G11, G12, G13
Valuation of Canadian- vs. U.S.-Listed Equity: Is There a Discount? Staff Working Paper 2003-6 Michael R. King, Dan Segal The authors examine how the valuation multiples assigned to the equity of Canadian-listed firms compare with the equity of comparable firms listed in the United States. They find that Canadian-listed firms trade at a discount to U.S.-listed firms across a range of valuation measures. Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Topic(s): Financial markets JEL Code(s): G, G1, G12, G15
Shift Contagion in Asset Markets Staff Working Paper 2003-5 Toni Gravelle, Maral Kichian, James Morley The authors develop a new methodology to investigate how crises cause the relationship between financial variables to change. Two possible sources of increased co-movement between markets during high-variance episodes are considered: larger common shocks operating through standard market linkages, and a structural change in the propagation of shocks between markets, called "shift contagion." Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Topic(s): Econometric and statistical methods, Financial markets JEL Code(s): C, C3, C32, F, F4, F42, G, G1, G15
Are Distorted Beliefs Too Good to be True? Staff Working Paper 2003-4 Miroslav Misina In a recent attempt to account for the equity-premium puzzle within a representative-agent model, Cecchetti, Lam, and Mark (2000) relax the assumption of rational expectations and in its place use the assumption of distorted beliefs. The author shows that the explanatory power of the distorted beliefs model is due to an inconsistency in the model and that an attempt to remove this inconsistency removes the model's explanatory power. Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Topic(s): Economic models, Financial markets JEL Code(s): D, D8, D84, G, G1, G12