The link between informed trading and the bid-ask spread has been the focus of abundant literature and some authors feared that a large amount of informed trading might lead to shutdown of markets. We explore this issue using data from the Czech Republic. Our estimates confirm that the share of...

The paper presents results of empirical tests with hybrid nominal exchange rate models for the Brazilian foreign exchange market, using macroeconomic and market microstructure variables. The basic model was originally proposed and tested in the German (DM/US$) and the Japanese (¥/US$) foreign...

Recently, the continuous double auction, i.e. the trading mechanism used in the majority of the financial markets, is the subject of an extensive study. In the present paper, a model of the continuous double auction with the completely random flow of the limit orders is studied. The main result...

This paper studies the performance of four market protocols with regard to allocative efficiency and other performance criteria such as volume or volatility. We examine batch auctions, continuous double auctions, specialist dealerships, and a hybrid of these last two. All protocols are...

This paper studies how the trade size and the historical sequence of trades affect bid-ask spreads, investors’ trading strategies, and the market maker’s learning process in a multi-period economy. First, we show that there is a nonzero cut-off size below which informed traders never buy or...

This paper studies an order-driven stock market where agents have heterogeneous estimates of the fundamental value of the risky asset. The agents are budget-constrained and follow a value-based trading strategy which buys or sells depending on whether the price of the asset is below or above its...