Policy Discrimination with and without Interpersonal Comparisons of Utility

Can the Pareto criterion guide policymakers who do not know the true model of the economy? If policymakers specify ex ante preferences for agents, then Pareto improvements from a distorted status quo are usually possible, and with more commodities than states, one can implement almost every Pareto optimum. Unlike the standard second welfare theorem, planners cannot dictate allocations: agents must trade. Unfortunately ex ante preferences impose interpersonal comparisons. If policymakers merely aim to maximize some social welfare function then optimal policies form an open set; hence small changes in the environment do not necessitate any policy response. Planners with symmetric information about agents can sometimes intervene without making interpersonal comparisons.     

Traders’ choice between limit and market orders: evidence from NYSE stocks

In this paper, we examine a trader's order choice between market and limit orders using a sample of orders submitted through NYSE SuperDot. We find that traders place more limit orders relative to market orders when: (1) the spread is large, (2) the order size is large, and (3) they expect high transitory price volatility. A rise in informational volatility appears neither to increase nor decrease the placement of limit orders. We also find that a rise in lagged price volatility decreases the size of spread, which is driven by the increase in the placement of limit orders.     

Determining the integrated volatility via limit order books with multiple records

The integrated volatility plays an important role in risk management and portfolio selection, the estimation methods regarding the quantity have been widely investigated, either under low-frequency data or high-frequency data, or a combination of both. In this paper, we propose a measure for the integrated volatility via limit order book data with possible presence of multiple records. The estimator is valid under mild conditions and it is easily implemented. The finite sample performance of the proposed estimator has been verified by simulation studies and we apply the method to some real high-frequency data-sets as well.     

Commonalities in the order book

This paper uses data from one of the most important European stock markets and shows that, in line with predictions from theoretical market microstructure, a small number of latent factors captures most of the variation in stock specific order books. We show that these order book commonalities are much stronger than liquidity commonality across stocks. The result that bid and ask side as well as the visible and hidden parts of the order book exhibit quite specific dynamics is interpreted as evidence that open order book markets attract a heterogeneous trader population in terms of asset valuations and impatience. Quantifying the informational content of the extracted factors with respect to the evolution of the asset price, we find that the factor information shares are highest (about 10%) for less frequently traded stocks. We also show that the informational content of hidden orders is limited.

Optimal order display in limit order markets with liquidity competition

Order display is associated with benefits and costs. Benefits arise from increased execution-priority, while costs are due to adverse market impact. We analyze a structural model of optimal order placement that captures trade-off between the costs and benefits of order display. For a benchmark model of pure liquidity competition, we give a closed-form solution for optimal display sizes. We show that competition in liquidity supply incentivizes the use of hidden orders to prevent losses due to over-bidding. Thus, because aggressive liquidity competition is more prevalent in liquid stocks, our model predicts that the proportion of hidden liquidity is higher in liquid markets. Our theoretical considerations ares supported by an empirical analysis using high-frequency order-message data from NASDAQ. We find that there are no benefits in hiding orders in il-liquid stocks, whereas the performance gains can be significant in liquid stocks.     

Limit theorems for reflected Ornstein–Uhlenbeck processes

This paper studies one‐dimensional Ornstein–Uhlenbeck (OU) processes, with the distinguishing feature that they are reflected on a single boundary (put at level 0) or two boundaries (put at levels 0 and d > 0). In the literature, they are referred to as reflected OU (ROU) and doubly reflected OU (DROU), respectively. For both cases, we explicitly determine the decay rates of the (transient) probability to reach a given extreme level. The methodology relies on sample‐path large deviations, so that we also identify the associated most likely paths. For DROU, we also consider the ‘idleness process’ L_t and the ‘loss process’ U_t, which are the minimal non‐decreasing processes, which make the OU process remain ≥ 0 and ≤ d, respectively. We derive central limit theorems (CLTs) for U_t and L_t, using techniques from stochastic integration and the martingale CLT.     

“限购令”是抑制房价上涨的有效政策工具吗？

2010年以来我国政府实施的五次房地产宏观调控中,以数量管制性质的“限购令”最为严苛,“限购令”对近年来我国住宅价格快速上涨趋势产生了怎样的效果？本文按照户籍和限购地域两个标准对限购政策了进行细分,在倍差法的研究框架内,通过动态面板模型GMM估计来评估限购政策细则对抑制住宅价格上涨的效果。实证研究发现：(1)对非户籍购房人实施限购的政策效果最为明显;(2)限购范围影响政策效果,仅在市区范围内限购难以起到抑制房价上涨的作用。通过对限购政策效果的评估,本文认为,投资(投机)性需求是推动我国住宅价格上升的重要力量,我国房地产泡沫的根源在于我国粗放的经济增长方式,通过货币超发带动经济增长的发展模式是房地产泡沫的根源所在,也是我国房地产市场调控的难度所在。     

The dynamics of ex-ante weighted spread: an empirical analysis

We model the evolution of the ex-ante weighted spread (EWS) embedded in an open Limit Order Book (LOB) and investigate the impact of observed market-related variables on the spread. Our modeling involves decomposing the joint distribution of the weighted spread into simple and interpretable distributions. Our main results have several implications: (i) EWS features high persistence in autocorrelation; (ii) lower-level LOB remains liquid even after a high trade imbalance; (iii) lower- and higher-level LOB react to temporal spread change and trade imbalance in different ways; and (iv) both trade durations and quote durations have seasonality effects. We also show, through a simple high frequency trading exercise, that the use of the model can be economically important. Further, our model provides an estimation of market resilience.     

Designs for estimating an extremal point of quadratic regression models in a hyperball

This paper is devoted to studying optimal designs for estimating an extremal point of a multivariate quadratic regression model in the unit hyperball. The problem of estimating an extremal point is reduced to that of estimating certain parameters of a corresponding nonlinear (in parameters) regression model. For this reduced problem truncated locally D-optimal designs are found in an explicit form. The result is a generalization of the results of Fedorov and Müller (1997) for onedimensional quadratic regression function in the unit segment. Received February 2002     

Estimation of the change point of a distribution based on the number of failed test items

This paper discusses the family of life distributions with failure rate functions which decrease initially until a change point and remain constant thereafter. The paper focuses on the estimation for the change point of the failure rate function. While point estimation of the change point of the failure rate function has been discussed by some authors, one can hardly find any existing work on the interval estimation of the change point. In this paper, a method for constructing approximate confidence intervals for the change point is proposed. The proposed approximate confidence intervals are based on the number of failed test items at or before a fixed inspection time. Received: September 1999