L1 - Market Structure, Firm Strategy, and Market Performance
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A Spatial Model of Bank Branches in Canada
This study explores the market structure of the Canadian banking industry at the postal-code level. In particular, we study the effect of geographic and industrial concentration on the density of bank branches. -
Banking Regulation and Market Making
We model how securities dealers respond to regulations on leverage, position, and liquidity such as those imposed by the Basel III framework. The dealers respond by endogenously moving to make markets on an agency basis, matching buyers to sellers rather than taking client positions on the balance sheet. -
Contagion in Dealer Networks
Dealers connect investors who want to buy or sell securities in financial markets. Over time, dealers and investors form trading networks to save time and resources. An emerging field of research investigates how networks form. -
Amazon Effects in Canadian Online Retail Firm-Product-Level Data
I use firm-product-level data for Canadian online retailers to study how product scope (the average number of product categories per firm) evolved from 1999 to 2012. During this period, product scope dropped monotonically from 59 to 5 product categories. -
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 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.