Benchmarks in Search Markets

We characterize the role of benchmarks in price transparency of over‐the‐counter markets. A benchmark can raise social surplus by increasing the volume of beneficial trade, facilitating more efficient matching between dealers and customers, and reducing search costs. Although the market transparency promoted by benchmarks reduces dealers' profit margins, dealers may nonetheless introduce a benchmark to encourage greater market participation by investors. Low‐cost dealers may also introduce a benchmark to increase their market share relative to high‐cost dealers. We construct a revelation mechanism that maximizes welfare subject to search frictions, and show conditions under which it coincides with announcing the benchmark.     

Relationship Trading in Over-the-Counter Markets

We examine the network of trading relationships between insurers and dealers in the over-the-counter (OTC) corporate bond market. Regulatory data show that one-third of insurers use a single dealer, whereas other insurers have large dealer networks. Execution prices are nonmonotone in network size, initially declining with more dealers but increasing once networks exceed 20 dealers. A model of decentralized trade in which insurers trade off the benefits of repeat business and faster execution quantitatively fits the distribution of insurers' network size and explains the price–network size relationship. Counterfactual analysis shows that regulations to unbundle trade and nontrade services can decrease welfare.     

Capital Commitment and Illiquidity in Corporate Bonds

We study trading costs and dealer behavior in U.S. corporate bond markets from 2006 to 2016. Despite a temporary spike during the financial crisis, average trade execution costs have not increased notably over time. However, dealer capital commitment, turnover, block trade frequency, and average trade size decreased during the financial crisis and thereafter. These declines are attributable to bank‐affiliated dealers, as nonbank dealers have increased their market commitment. Our evidence indicates that liquidity provision in the corporate bond markets is evolving away from the commitment of bank‐affiliated dealer capital to absorb customer imbalances, and that postcrisis banking regulations likely contribute.     

DO DEALERS INFER INFORMATION FROM ORDER FLOW?

I examine strategic behavior among dealers in the NASDAQ market and document that there is a lead quote‐setting dealer in each security and that the quotes posted by this leader are informative. Other dealers free‐ride this information by following the lead quote‐setting dealer. The lead dealer can be identified by two information signals: (1) percentage of time spent on the inside market (i.e., posting inside quotes), and (2) trade volume transacted. Dealers that free‐ride the leader's quotes quickly update their posted quotes in the same direction as the leader's quote change. My findings suggest that directing trade to the lead dealer may be more advantageous than randomly routing trade.     

Information Asymmetries and Security Market Design: An Empirical Study of the Secondary Market for U.S. Government Securities

This paper examines the empirical implications of an information asymmetry between primary and secondary dealers in the U.S. Government Securities market. This asymmetry arises because primary dealers are permitted to trade through all brokers operating in the marketplace while secondary dealers are restricted to trade through only a subset of brokers. Brokers distribute valuable information over video screens to their trading clients including dealers' up-to-date bid-ask spreads and recent transaction prices. As such, all brokers' video screen information is available to primary dealers, while only a subset of brokers' information is available to secondary dealers. Empirical analyses detect the resulting information asymmetry.     

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.     

Information Revelation in Decentralized Markets

How does information get revealed in decentralized markets? We test several hypotheses inspired by recent dealer‐network theory. To do so, we construct an empirical map of information revelation where two dealers are connected based on the synchronicity of their quote changes. The tests, based on the euro to Swiss franc spot rate (EUR/CHF) quote data including the 2015 crash, largely support theory: strongly connected (i.e., central) dealers are more informed. Connections are weaker when there is less to be learned. The crash serves to identify how a network forms when dealers are transitioned from no‐learning to learning, that is, from a fixed to a floating rate.     

International trade and financial integration: a weighted network analysis

The authors analyse patterns of international trade and financial integration using complex network analysis. The combination of both binary and weighted approaches delivers more precise and thorough insights into the topological structure and properties of international trade and financial networks (ITN and IFN). It is found that the ITN is more densely connected than the IFN, while both types of network display a core–periphery structure. This hierarchical organization is more pronounced in financial markets, suggesting that the bulk of trade in financial assets occurs through a handful of countries acting as hubs. High-income countries are better linked and form groups of tightly interconnected nodes. This kind of structure can explain why the recent financial crisis has spread rapidly among advanced countries while reaching emerging markets only in a second phase.     

Does Risk Sharing Motivate Interdealer Trading?

We use unique data from the London Stock Exchange to test whether interdealer trade facilitates inventory risk sharing among dealers. We develop a methodology that focuses on periods of "extreme" inventories—inventory cycles. We further distinguish between inventory cycles that are unanticipated and those that are anticipated because of "worked" orders. The pattern of interdealer trade during inventory cycles matches theoretical predictions for the direction of trade and the inventories of trade counterparts. We also show that London dealers receive higher trading revenues for taking larger positions.     

ANALYST REPUTATION,DEALER AFFILIATION,AND MARKET MAKING

We investigate the effects of analysts' affiliation and reputation on dealers' market making activities. We find that for a given stock, dealers who have affiliated analysts covering the stock quote and trade more aggressively than those who do not have any affiliated analysts. More important, the reputation of affiliated analysts plays an additional role in the affiliated dealer's quote and trade behavior. Dealers with affiliated star analysts post more aggressive quotes and have larger market shares than dealers with affiliated nonstar analysts. Although dealers who post more aggressive quotes also induce affiliated star analysts to cover the stocks, the positive effect of analyst reputation on the affiliated dealers' quote aggressiveness remains significant and robust after controlling for potential endogenous and simultaneous problems.     

Liquidity in a Market for Unique Assets: Specified Pool and To‐Be‐Announced Trading in the Mortgage‐Backed Securities Market

Agency mortgage‐backed securities (MBS) trade simultaneously in a market for specified pools (SPs) and in the to‐be‐announced (TBA) forward market. TBA trading creates liquidity by allowing thousands of different MBS to be traded in a handful of TBA contracts. SPs that are eligible to be traded as TBAs have significantly lower trading costs than other SPs. We present evidence that TBA eligibility, in addition to characteristics of TBA‐eligible SPs, lowers trading costs. We show that dealers hedge SP inventory with TBA trades, and they are more likely to prearrange trades in SPs that are difficult to hedge.     

PRICE AND QUANTITY QUOTES ON NASDAQ: A STUDY OF DEALER QUOTATION BEHAVIOR

We show that the majority of quotes posted by NASDAQ dealers are noncompetitive and only 19.5% (18.4%) of bid (ask) quotes are at the inside. The percentage of dealer quotes that are at the inside is higher for stocks with wider spreads, fewer market makers, and more frequent trading, and lower for stocks with larger trade sizes and higher return volatility. These results support our conjecture that dealers have greater incentives to be at the inside for stocks with larger market‐making revenues and smaller costs. Dealers post large depths when their quotes are at the inside and frequently quote the minimum required depth when they are not at the inside. The latter quotation behavior leads to the negative intertemporal correlation between dealer spread and depth.     

Risk Management with Derivatives by Dealers and Market Quality in Government Bond Markets

This paper investigates how bond dealers manage core business risk with interest rate futures and the extent to which market quality is affected by their selective risk taking. We observe that dealers use futures to take directional bets and hedge changes in their spot exposure. We find that, cross‐sectionally, a dealer with longer (shorter) risk exposure sells (buys) a larger amount of exposure the next day. However, this risk control takes place via the futures market and not the spot market. Finally, we find strong support for the price effects of capital constraints emphasized by Froot and Stein (1998).     

Belief-free price formation

We analyze security price formation in a dynamic setting in which long-lived dealers repeatedly compete for the opportunity to trade with short-lived retail traders. We characterize equilibria in which dealers’ pricing strategies are optimal irrespective of the private information that each dealer may possess. Thus, our model’s predictions are robust to different specifications of the dealers’ information structure. These equilibria reconcile, in a unified and parsimonious framework, price dynamics that are reminiscent of well-known stylized facts: excess price volatility, price to trading flow correlation, stochastic volatility and inventory-related trading.     

Competing for Order Flow in OTC Markets

We develop a model of a two‐sided asset market in which trades are intermediated by dealers and are bilateral. Dealers compete to attract order flow by posting the terms at which they execute trades—which can include prices, quantities, and execution speed—and investors direct their orders toward dealers who offer the most attractive terms. We characterize the equilibrium in a general setting, and we illustrate theoretically and numerically how the model can account for several important trading patterns in over‐the‐counter markets, which do not emerge from existing models.     

Crossing Networks and Dealer Markets: Competition and Performance

This paper studies the interaction between dealer markets and a relatively new form of exchange, passive crossing networks, where buyers and sellers trade directly with one another. We find that the crossing network is characterized by both positive ('liquidity') and negative ('crowding') externalities, and we analyze the effects of its introduction on the dealer market. Traders who use the dealer market as a 'market of last resort' can induce dealers to widen their spread and can lead to more efficient subsequent prices, but traders who only use the crossing network can provide a counterbalancing effect by reducing adverse selection and inventory holding costs.     

When It's Not The Only Game in Town: The Effect of Bilateral Search on the Quality of a Dealer Market

We report results from experimental asset markets with liquidity traders and an insider where we allow bilateral trade to take place, in addition to public trade with dealers. In the absence of the search alternative, dealer profits are large—unlike in models with risk-neutral, competitive dealers. However, when we allow traders to participate in the search market, dealer profits are close to zero. Dealers compete more aggressively with the alternative trading avenue than with each other. There is no evidence that price discovery is less efficient when the specialists are not the only game in town.     

Dealer behavior and trading systems in foreign exchange markets

We study dealer behavior in the foreign exchange spot market using detailed observations on all the transactions of four interbank dealers. There is strong support for an information effect in incoming trades. The direction of trade is most important, but we also find that the information effect increases with trade size in direct bilateral trades. All four dealers control their inventory intensively. Inventory control is not, however, manifested through a dealer's own prices in contrast to findings by Lyons (J. Financial Econ. 39(1995) 321). Furthermore, we document differences in trading styles, especially how they actually control their inventories.     

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.     

Financial networks,bank efficiency and risk-taking

Networks with a core–periphery topology are found in many financial systems across different jurisdictions. Though the theoretical and structural aspects of core–periphery networks are clear, the consequences that core–periphery structures bring for banking efficiency stand as an open question. We address this gap in the literature by providing insights as to how the structure of financial networks can affect bank efficiency. We find that core–periphery structures are cost efficient for banks, which is a characteristic that encourages the participation of banks in financial networks. On the downside, we also show that core–periphery structures are risk-taking inefficient, because they imply higher systemic risk levels in the financial system. In this way, regulators should be aware of the excessive risk inefficiency that arises in the financial system due to individual decisions made by banks in the network.