High-Frequency Trading,Liquidity Withdrawal,and the Breakdown of Conventions in Foreign Exchange Markets

Conventions, or “that the existing state of affairs will continue indefinitely, except in so far as we have specific reasons to expect a change” (Keynes 1936), play a central role in over-the-counter markets. For instance, by allowing expectations about the future to become more harmonized and orderly, they act as stabilizers for the provision of liquidity. Conventions might, of course, change at any time. Nonetheless, by being attached to the daily trading routine and/or integrated within the institutional structure, the confidence in their relevance and validity can be long-lasting. In the foreign exchange market, in particular, where prices are quoted to end-users on demand, market-making banks rely on a convention to quote prices to each other to maintain liquidity. However, the rise of algorithmic and high-frequency trading poses a practical as well as a theoretical challenge to such conventions. By reacting ultra-fast to new information, including to new limit orders submitted by others, markets largely populated with algorithmic traders have become susceptible to a withdrawal of liquidity at an unprecedented speed and scale. Using a high-frequency dataset provided by Electronic Broking Services (EBS), we investigate the process of liquidity withdrawal from the foreign exchange spot market. By doing so, we consider the crowding out of conventions associated with liquidity provision, traditionally upheld through mutual understanding among financial institutions – in other words, reciprocity and trust among humans.     

LIBOR as a Keynesian Beauty Contest: A Process of Endogenous Deception

This paper uses the Keynesian Beauty Contest as a theoretical framework to analyse the London Interbank Offered Rate (LIBOR) fixing mechanism, where the actual money market rate is seen as a fundamental value towards which the LIBOR should aim. By treating the LIBOR as the outcome of a particular kind of p-beauty contest game, in which players (LIBOR banks) are guided by higher order beliefs, a process is created whereby they are not solely dependent on their own incentives and constraints. Instead, potential deception is generated endogenously though the fixing process itself, resulting in systematic deviations of the LIBOR from its fundamental value.     

Multiple Objective Approach as an Alternative to Radial Projection in DEA

Radial projection is a standard technique applied in data envelopment analysis (DEA) to calculate efficiency scores for input and/or output variables. In this paper, we have studied the appropriateness of radial projection for target setting. We have created a situation where the decision making units (DMUs) are free to choose their own target values on the efficient frontier and then compared the results to those of radial projection. In practice, target values are primarily used for future goal attainment; hence, not only preferences but also, and on the whole, change in time frame, affect the choice of target values. Based on that, we conducted an empirical experiment with an aim to study how the DMUs choose their most preferred target values on the efficient frontier. The subjects, who all were students of the Helsinki School of Economics, were given the freedom to explore their personalized efficient frontiers by using a multiple objective linear programming (MOLP) approach. To study various and relevant scenarios, the personalized efficient frontiers for all students were constructed in such a way that the current position of each student in relation to the frontier made him/her inefficient, efficient, or super-efficient. The results show that the use of radial projection for target setting is too restrictive.     

The Covered Interest Parity Puzzle and the Evolution of the Japan Premium

A disturbance or breakdown of the first stage of the monetary transmission mechanism tends to be synonymous with high and volatile money market risk premia. Such market indicators include violations of the covered interest parity (CIP). This was not only evident during the financial crisis of 2007–08, but already during the Japanese banking crisis in the late 1990s, when it became referred to as the “Japan Premium.” Despite extraordinary policy measures by central banks in recent years, however, deviations from the CIP indicate continuing or even elevated stress in the international monetary system. This paper examines a string of distinct, but closely interconnected, assumptions and perceptions regarding CIP arbitrage. By doing so, it not only sheds some fresh light on the recent “CIP puzzle” but also on the era of the Japan Premium during the 1990s and its aftermath.