G20 - General
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Did Canadian Corporate Bond Funds Increase their Exposures to Risks?
Canadian corporate bond mutual funds have rapidly increased in number and size in recent years. Their holdings have also become riskier, increasing their exposures to credit risk, interest rate risk and liquidity risk. We also briefly discuss financial stability implications. -
High-Frequency Trading and Institutional Trading Costs
Using bond futures data, we test whether high-frequency trading (HFT) is engaging in back running, a trading strategy that can create costs for financial institutions. We reject the hypothesis of back running and find instead that HFT mildly improves trading costs for institutions. -
Adverse Selection with Heterogeneously Informed Agents
A model of over-the-counter markets is proposed. Some asset buyers are informed in that they can identify high quality assets. Heterogeneous sellers with private information choose what type of buyers they want to trade with. -
Optimal Interbank Regulation
Recent years have seen renewed interest in the regulation of interbank markets. A review of the literature in this area identifies two gaps: first, the literature has tended to make ad hoc assumptions about the interbank contract space, which makes it difficult to generate convincing policy prescriptions; second, the literature has tended to focus on ex-post interventions that kick in only after an interbank disruption has come underway (e.g., open-market operations, lender-of-last-resort interventions, bail-outs), rather than ex-ante prudential policies. -
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). -
May 11, 2017 Wholesale Funding of the Big Six Canadian Banks
The Big Six Canadian banks are a dominant component of the Canadian financial system. How they finance their business activities is fundamental to how effective they are. Retail and commercial deposits along with wholesale funding represent the two major sources of funds for Canadian banks. What wholesale funding instruments do the Big Six banks use? How do they choose between different funding sources, funding strategies and why? How have banks changed their funding mix since the 2007–09 global financial crisis? -
Strategic Complementarities and Money Market Fund Liquidity Management
Following the financial crisis, there has been increased regulatory focus on the management of liquidity in mutual funds and, specifically, whether funds hold enough liquidity to guard against the potential for investor runs. -
Banking Regulation and Market Making
We present a model of market makers subject to recent banking regulations: liquidity and capital constraints in the style of Basel III and a position limit in the style of the Volcker Rule. -
Options Decimalization
We document the outcome of an options decimalization pilot on Canada’s derivatives exchange. Decimalization improves measures of liquidity and price efficiency. The impact differs by the moneyness of an option and is greatest for out-of-the-money options. -
Retail Order Flow Segmentation
In August 2012, the New York Stock Exchange launched the Retail Liquidity Program (RLP), a trading facility that enables participating organizations to quote dark limit orders executable only by retail traders.