Do the Italian Stars' Shine in a Hybrid Market?

The market microstructure literature focused particularly, in the last few years, on hybrid market structures, and actual markets offer some major examples of this kind like NYSE or the London Stock Exchange (the SET segment).This paper provides unique additional evidence represented by the Italian STAR market, a segment that in 2001 experienced the introduction of the specialist, transforming an order driven market in a hybrid one, and an increase in the transparency level.The empirical evidence shows that the STAR stocks experienced an improvement in liquidity (measured by trading volumes and spreads) and in the price discovery process, and to some extent it is possible to argue that these improvements are mainly due to the Specialist's activity