This dissertation consists of three essays that uncover the origins of market frictions and their implications for the functioning of the global foreign exchange (FX) market. The first research paper speaks to the hegemony of the US dollar in FX trading. Over 85% of all FX transactions involve...

For an investor with constant absolute risk aversion and a long horizon, who trades in amarket with constant investment opportunities and small proportional transaction costs, weobtain explicitly the optimal investment policy, its implied welfare, liquidity premium, andtrading volume. We...

In a market with one safe and one risky asset, an investor with a long horizon, constantinvestment opportunities, and constant relative risk aversion trades with small proportionaltransaction costs. We derive explicit formulas for the optimal investment policy, its impliedwelfare, liquidity...

Most time series models used in econometrics and empirical finance are estimated withmaximum likelihood methods, in particular when interest centers on density and Value{at{Risk (VaR) prediction. The standard maximum likelihood principle implicitly placesequal weight on each of the observations...

This paper examines the relative information shares of the Bund, i.e. the ten-year Euro bondfuture contract on German sovereign debt, versus two futures with shorter maturity. We findthat the Bund is most important but does not dominate price discovery. The other contractsalso have relevant –...

This paper studies the effects of investors’ heterogeneous beliefs on the trading volume,price volatility, and liquidity of stocks. Following Kurz and Motolese (2008), wepropose a simple theoretical model to show that the equilibrium stock price is linearlyand positively correlated with market...

The development of Asian foreign exchange markets has progressed appreciably in recent years. Data from the BIS Triennial Central Bank Survey indicate that the turnover of Asian currencies rose sharply between 2004 and 2007, financial institutions became more important customers, and the...

This paper introduces a new technique to infer the risk-neutral probability distribution of an asset from the prices of options on this asset. The technique is based on using the trading volume of each option as a proxy of the informativeness of the option. Not requiring the implied probability...