Foreign Under‐Investment in US Securities and the Role of Relational Capital

Over 70 academic papers attempt to explain why foreigners invest in US securities. All ignore the vital role of the US broker‐dealer. Macroeconomic factors like a trade balance or corporate governance may guide foreign investors toward certain markets. But US broker‐dealers provide information to foreign investors and execute the actual trades. We hypothesize that particular foreign investors under‐invest in US securities because of a lack of relational capital with US broker‐dealers. We find that broker‐dealer marketing intensity in foreign markets partly explains foreigners’ decisions to invest in US securities. We also estimate “pent‐up” demand for US securities in developing countries – like China, Argentina, Turkey and Russia –equals roughly half‐a‐trillion dollars. Such pent‐up demand – represented as a convergence gap with investment‐to‐GDP ratios in highly developed capital markets – helps predict which markets these broker‐dealers are likely to invest marketing effort in the future. As such, broker‐dealers interested in assisting foreign investors find the right securities for their portfolios should not focus on big, rich economies. They should focus on economies with the largest convergence gaps. We also find that broker‐dealers must take in account the effect their marketing effort has on the typical variables (like relative returns, risks, asymmetric shocks and communication with the US) when they use these screening variables in deciding where to build their relational capital (and place their sales effort) in any year.     

Excess demand and equilibration in multi-security financial markets: the empirical evidence

Price dynamics are studied in a dataset of more than 11,000 transactions from large-scale financial markets experiments with multiple risky securities. The aim is to determine whether a few simple principles govern equilibration. We first ask whether price changes are driven by excess demand. The data strongly support this conjecture. Second, we investigate the presence of cross-security effects (the excess demands of other securities influence price changes of a security beyond its own excess demand). We find systematic cross-security effects, despite the fact that transactions in one market cannot be made conditional on events in other markets. Nevertheless, stability is not found to be compromised in our data. A curious relationship emerges between the signs of the cross-effects and the signs of the covariances of the payoffs of the corresponding securities. It suggests a link between price discovery in real markets and the Newton procedure in numerical computation of general equilibrium. Next, we investigate whether the book (the set of posted limit orders) plays a role in the process by which excess demand becomes reflected in transaction price changes. We find strong correlation between excess demands and a weighted average of the quotes in the book. The correlation is far from perfect, and we document that our weighted average of the quotes in the book explains part of the variance of transaction price changes that is unaccounted for by excess demands.     

Financial Economists' Roundtable Statement on THE STRUCTURE OF SECURITIES MARKETS

Market practitioners, regulators, and economists are now debating the merits of a national market system—a single, fully integrated securities market that would be coordinated by a central computer and mandated by the SEC. This brief statement, signed by 29 distinguished financial economists, argues that such a system is a badidea. The multiplicity of U.S. markets is a sign of innovation and vibrant competition, not a problem that requires regulatory intervention. As a variety of markets with different technologies and trading procedures vie for somewhat different groups of customers with different needs, the result is competing market centers—registered exchanges (such as NYSE and AMEX) with designated specialists; NASDAQ with competing dealers; third market dealers in listed securities; and alternative trading systems (regulated as brokers) serving institutional investors or providing on-line trading to individual investors. Moreover, the fact that the different U.S. markets are linked in various ways and degrees—for example, by information and by private order routing systems of brokers and markets—should caution us against viewing market "fragmentation" as a public policy problem in need of a solution     

Taxing transactions in futures markets: Objectives and effects

In the last few years various legislative proposals have been made to impose a transaction or excise tax on securities and derivative market transactions. Although there have been considerable discussion and analysis of the wisdom of imposing such a tax on securities markets, there has been no analysis of the pros and cons of extending the tax to futures markets. This article attempts to fill this gap, first, by examining the various rationales advanced to support a tax on securities markets to determine their applicability to futures markets and, second, by analyzing the likely effects of the tax on the competitiveness and efficiency of futures markets. In addition, the revenue-raising potential of a tax on futures transactions is evaluated. I conclude that a tax on futures markets will not achieve any important social objective and will not generate much revenue.     

Financial Intermediaries and the Cross‐Section of Asset Returns

Financial intermediaries trade frequently in many markets using sophisticated models. Their marginal value of wealth should therefore provide a more informative stochastic discount factor (SDF) than that of a representative consumer. Guided by theory, we use shocks to the leverage of securities broker‐dealers to construct an intermediary SDF. Intuitively, deteriorating funding conditions are associated with deleveraging and high marginal value of wealth. Our single‐factor model prices size, book‐to‐market, momentum, and bond portfolios with an R² of 77% and an average annual pricing error of 1%—performing as well as standard multifactor benchmarks designed to price these assets.     

融资融券、股指期货登场

如果从更大的视角来看此次两项制度的推出,可以说是中国资本市场基础性制度建设、不断丰富证券交易方式、完善市场功能的一次里程碑式的改革。人们期待着中国证券市场涉深水试验平稳度过     

Costless Signalling in Financial Markets

A costless, fully revealing signalling equilibrium is derived from two easily understandable conditions. The outsider-rationality condition states that the outsiders relate the price that they offer to pay for a security inversely to the supply of this security, which they interpret as a quality signal. The no-arbitrage condition requires that the marginal exchange rate for two securities be the same in both primary and secondary markets. These conditions restrict the firm's financing policy and have strong implications for the valuation of securities and of the total firm. A costless signalling equilibrium is obtained.     

Automation versus Intermediation: Evidence from Treasuries Going Off the Run

This paper examines the choice of trading venue by dealers in U.S. Treasury securities to determine when services provided by human intermediaries are difficult to replicate in fully automated trading systems. When Treasury securities go “off the run” their trading volume drops by more than 90%. This decline in trading volume allows us to test whether intermediaries' knowledge of the market and its participants can uncover hidden liquidity and facilitate better matching of customer orders in less active markets. Consistent with this hypothesis, the market share of electronic intermediaries falls from 81% to 12% when securities go off the run.     

Click or Call? Auction versus Search in the Over‐the‐Counter Market

Over‐the‐counter (OTC) markets dominate trading in many asset classes. Will electronic trading displace traditional OTC “voice” trading? Can electronic and voice systems coexist? What types of securities and trades are best suited for electronic trading? We study these questions by focusing on an innovation in electronic trading technology that enables investors to simultaneously search many bond dealers. We show that periodic one‐sided electronic auctions are a viable and important source of liquidity even in inactively traded instruments. These mechanisms are a natural compromise between bilateral search in OTC markets and continuous double auctions in electronic limit order books.     

Price dispersion in OTC markets: A new measure of liquidity

In this paper, we model price dispersion effects in over-the-counter (OTC) markets to show that, in the presence of inventory risk for dealers and search costs for investors, traded prices may deviate from the expected market valuation of an asset. We interpret this deviation as a liquidity effect and develop a new liquidity measure quantifying the price dispersion in the context of the US corporate bond market. This market offers a unique opportunity to study liquidity effects since, from October 2004 onwards, all OTC transactions in this market have to be reported to a common database known as the Trade Reporting and Compliance Engine (TRACE). Furthermore, market-wide average price quotes are available from Markit Group Limited, a financial information provider. Thus, it is possible, for the first time, to directly observe deviations between transaction prices and the expected market valuation of securities. We quantify and analyze our new liquidity measure for this market and find significant price dispersion effects that cannot be simply captured by bid-ask spreads. We show that our new measure is indeed related to liquidity by regressing it on commonly-used liquidity proxies and find a strong relation between our proposed liquidity measure and bond characteristics, as well as trading activity variables. Furthermore, we evaluate the reliability of end-of-day marks that traders use to value their positions. Our evidence suggests that the price deviations from expected market valuations are significantly larger and more volatile than previously assumed. Overall, the results presented here improve our understanding of the drivers of liquidity and are important for many applications in OTC markets, in general.     

Price Formation and Equilibrium Liquidity in Fragmented and Centralized Markets

This paper compares centralized and fragmented markets, such as floor and telephone markets. Risk-averse agents compete for one market order. In centralized markets, these agents are market makers or limit order traders. They are assumed to observe the quotes of their competitors. In fragmented markets they are dealers. They can only assess the positions of their competitors. We analyze differences in bidding strategies reflecting differences in market structures. The equilibrium number of dealers is shown to be increasing in the frequency of trades and the volatility of the value of the asset. The expected spread is shown to be equal in both markets, ceteris paribus. But the spread is more volatile in centralized than in fragmented markets.     

基于衍生金融工具会计教育质量的实证调查

随着融资融券和股指期货在我国的推出,我国衍生金融品市场建设又迈上了一个新的台阶。如何提高衍生金融工具会计信息披露质量已成为当前研究的热点之一,作为正确引导衍生金融交易行为,规范衍生金融市场向健康方向发展的会计教育,其质量的好坏不仅影响衍生金融工具的创新,更影响我国衍生金融市场的可持续发展。基于此,本文对衍生金融工具会计教育质量进行了调查．针对存在的问题进行了深层剖析并提出了相应的建议。     

SECURITIZATION: A FINANCING STRATEGY FOR EMERGING MARKETS FIRMS

With emerging markets now in crisis, companies in developing countries are finding it difficult to obtain financing. Securitization, a transaction structure in which the securities sold to investors are backed by a company's receivables, is one of the few vehicles with at least the potential to provide financing at economic rates in the current environment of uncertainty.
Unlike U.S. securitization issues, emerging markets transactions often use a structure known as "future flows" securitization, in which the securities are backed by receivables that are not expected to be generated until after issuance. This article begins by describing how the process of future flows securitization carves out securities with levels of political risk acceptable to foreign capital market investors. Then it traces the history of emerging markets securitization from its origins in Latin America to its more recent uses during the Asian crisis. Securitization helped bring foreign investors back to Latin America after its debt crisis of the early 1980s. And while the Asian crisis has sharply reduced new issuance for all kinds of emerging market financings, the volume of securitization issues appears to have declined less precipitously than other types of transactions geared to foreign investors. Moreover, investment bankers are now hard at work planning new securitization issues for companies in both Latin America and Asia.
In exploring the longer-term effects of securitization on both domestic issuers and their economies, the author suggests that securitization could play a pivotal role in restoring emerging markets companies' access to global financial markets. Indeed, with a few exceptions such as Malaysia, most emerging markets are now responding to the crisis by taking measures to protect investors, such as requiring greater financial transparency and dispelling legal uncertainties that have discouraged securitization in particular and overseas investment more generally.     

Local parametric analysis of derivatives pricing and hedging

A novel methodology for the analysis of derivatives pricing in incomplete markets is tested empirically. The methodology generates hedge ratios and derivatives prices. They are estimated from the correlation structure between the local co-movements of securities prices. First, the hedge ratios from a parsimonious complete-market model are estimated by fitting locally the changes in the derivatives and the underlying securities prices. Second, derivatives prices are obtained from the locally estimated hedge ratios. The methodology, referred to as local parametric estimation, is tested on a dataset of DAX index options and futures transactions from the computerized German Futures Exchange.     

Equilibrium mispricing in a capital market with portfolio constraints

This article develops a general equilibrium, continuous timemodel where portfolio constraints generate mispricing betweenredundant securities. Constrained consumption-portfolio optimizationtechniques are adapted to incorporate redundant, possibly mispricedsecurities. Under logarithmic preferences, we provide explicitconditions for mispricing and closed-form expressions for alleconomic quantities. Existence of an equilibrium where mispricingoccurs with positive probability is verified in a specific case.In a more general setting, we demonstrate the necessity of mispricingfor equilibrium when agents are heterogeneous enough. The constructionof a representative agent with stochastic weights allows usto characterize prices and allocations, given mispricing occurs.     

THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN OTC BID-ASK SPREADS AND DEALER SIZE: THE IMPACT OF ORDER-PROCESSING AND DIVERSIFICATION COSTS

The effects of large transactions on OTC security dealers' bid-ask spreads are analyzed for stocks with different price levels. Because overhead expenses vary little with the value of transactions, economies of scale exist for dealers in higher-priced stocks. Thus, percentage bid-ask spreads decline with the price level of the stock. However, larger transactions entail larger order-clearing and inventory-adjustment costs. These costs may be particularly burdensome for smaller dealers with limited purchasing powers and abilities to diversify inexpensively. Consequently, smaller dealers charge higher spreads for trading high-priced stocks.     

Equilibrium in risk-sharing games

The large majority of risk-sharing transactions involve few agents, each of whom can heavily influence the structure and the prices of securities. In this paper, we propose a game where agents’ strategic sets consist of all possible sharing securities and pricing kernels that are consistent with Arrow–Debreu sharing rules. First, it is shown that agents’ best response problems have unique solutions. The risk-sharing Nash equilibrium admits a finite-dimensional characterisation, and it is proved to exist for an arbitrary number of agents and to be unique in the two-agent game. In equilibrium, agents declare beliefs on future random outcomes different from their actual probability assessments, and the risk-sharing securities are endogenously bounded, implying (among other things) loss of efficiency. In addition, an analysis regarding extremely risk-tolerant agents indicates that they profit more from the Nash risk-sharing equilibrium than compared to the Arrow–Debreu one.     

Providing liquidity in an illiquid market: Dealer behavior in US corporate bonds

We examine market making behavior of dealers for 55,988 corporate bonds, many of which trade infrequently. Dealers have a substantially higher propensity to offset trades within the same day rather than committing capital for longer periods for riskier and less actively traded bonds. Dealers’ holding periods do not decline with a bond's prior trading activity and in fact are lowest for some of the least active bonds. As a result, cross-sectional estimates of roundtrip trading costs do not increase as prior trading activity declines. Our results suggest that dealers endogenously adjust their behavior to mitigate inventory risk from trading in illiquid and higher risk securities, balancing search and inventory costs in equilibrium such that observed spreads can appear invariant to expected liquidity.     

Optimal portfolio choice of gold assets in the differential market and differential game structures

Portfolio choices of gold-related assets for market investors and dealers may not only depend on price differences and the inflation rate, but may also react to the market participants’ strategic behavior and risk attitude. This study develops a two-agent stochastic differential game model to solve the portfolio choice problem of the asset allocations of gold spot, futures, and cash for market participators who are exposed to inflation risks. The equilibrium prices of spot and futures driven by the volatility rate and co-variances that reflect various risk sources are also determined. Specifically, regarding the choice of hedging tools, market participators may prefer gold spot to futures for the purpose of hedging inflation risk. By capturing the stylistic facts of differential market and multiple agent structures, the article can develop a more reasonable and practical model to usefully explain the gold portfolio choices and pricing in the gold markets.