The Impact of Unanticipated Defaults in Canada's Large Value Transfer System

Canada's Large Value Transfer System (LVTS) is designed to meet international risk-proofing standards at a minimum cost to participants in terms of collateral requirements. It does so, in part, through collateralized risk-sharing arrangements whereby participants may incur losses if another participant defaults. The LVTS is designed to be robust to defaults. Its rules, however, do not ensure that individual participants are robust to defaults. The author studies participants' robustness to default empirically by creating unanticipated defaults in LVTS, and finds that all participants are able to withstand their loss allocations that result from the largest defaults she can create using actual LVTS data.Financial institutions; Payment, clearing, and settlement systems

Price Movements in the Canadian Residential Mortgage Market

The authors empirically analyze the price-setting behaviour of the major Canadian banks in the residential mortgage market over the period 1991–2007. They use weekly posted prices of the major mortgage providers to study the degree of competition in mortgage price setting. Their results suggest that the residential mortgage market is imperfectly competitive. They find distinct price leaders and that, as market concentration increases, so does price dispersion - helped by the increased use of discounting from posted prices. The authors also find that, although banks' pass-through of input price changes to mortgage prices is complete in the long run under reasonable assumptions regarding discounting, there exists some level of pricing asymmetry in the short run.Financial Financial institutions; Financial services

Financial Constraints and the Cash-Holding Behaviour of Canadian Firms

The proportion of assets held by the average Canadian firm in the form of cash has increased steadily since the early 1990s, and is now roughly twice as large as in 1990. The literature has established that the cash-holding behaviour of firms is highly correlated with financial constraints and firm characteristics. The authors use a firm-level data set covering Canadian firms from 1980 to 2006 to understand which firm characteristics are associated with higher cash holdings. They find that financial constraints are likely important for explaining firms' higher cash holdings, and that the recent increase in the cash holdings of Canadian firms can be almost entirely explained by changes in firm characteristics. Specifically, higher recent cash holdings are correlated with the average Canadian firm having become smaller, having more variable cash flow, holding lower levels of cash substitutes, having higher expenditure on research and development, and being more likely to be financially distressed. The authors also find that the average Canadian firm has a cash ratio that is only slightly higher than would be predicted by out-of-sample forecasts over the 1990s and 2000s, though the divergence between the actual and predicted values has been increasing in recent years.Sectoral balance sheet