We employ a comprehensive data set and a variety of methods to provide evidence on the magnitude of large banks’ funding advantage in Canada, and on the extent to which market discipline exists across different securities issued by the Canadian banks.
This article examines the incentives for banks to hold various assets on their balance sheets for use as collateral when the opportunity cost of doing so can be high. Focusing on the five-year period (2002-07) that preceded the financial crisis, it examines the choices made by financial institutions among the assets that are pledged as collateral in Canada's Large Value Transfer System. This serves as a baseline for collateral-management practices during relatively normal times. The results of this study are important for policy-makers, especially the Bank of Canada, which is concerned both about the efficient functioning of fixed-income markets and about the credit risk it ultimately bears in insuring LVTS settlement. The results suggest that relative market liquidity and market-making capacity are important factors in the choice of securities pledged as collateral in the LVTS.
Access to information about the future direction of the exchange rate can be extremely valuable in the foreign exchange market. Evidence presented in this article suggests that Canadian dealers are more likely to provide interday liquidity to foreign, rather than Canadian, financial customers, since foreign financial flows can be more informative about future movements in the exchange rate. The author reveals a statistical relationship between the supply of liquidity provided by non-financial firms and that provided by dealing institutions across time, and across markets, and suggests that the relationship between the positions of commercial clients and market-makers, and the role played by dealers in interday liquidity provision, has been understated in the market microstructure literature.
This paper illustrates that dealers in foreign exchange markets not only provide intraday liquidity, they are key participants in the provision of overnight liquidity. Dealing institutions receive compensation for holding undesired inventory balances in part from the information they receive in customer trades.
"The Effects of Bank Consolidation on Risk Capital Allocation and Market Liquidity" (with A. Lai), 2006, in Journal of Financial Research, 29, p. 271-291.
"How Liquid are Canadas?" (with C. Gaa), 2004, Canadian Investment Review, Winter, p. 23-28.
"How Do Banks Respond to Capital Shocks?" (with A. Lai), 2004, Monetaria, 27:1 p. 33-56.
