For decades credit rating agencies were viewed as trusted arbiters of creditworthiness and their ratings as important tools for managing risk. The common narrative is that the value of ratings was compromised by the evolution of the industry to a form where issuers pay for ratings. In this paper...

A first step in the 'big bang' markets was the deregulation of the foreign exchange market on April 1, 1998. This paper examines how the bid-ask spread and conditional volatility in the yen/dollar foreign exchange market changed around the time of the deregulation. Intra-day data are analyzed...

"Fixing" in the foreign exchange market is a market practice that determines the bid-ask-mid-point exchange rate at a scheduled time, 10am in Tokyo and 4pm in London. The fixing exchange rate is then applied to the settlement of foreign exchange transactions between banks and retail customers...

We report findings from a survey of United States foreign exchange traders. Our results indicate that: (i) The share of customer business, versus interbank business, has remained fairly constant; (ii) The channels by which transactions take place have changed, as electronically-brokered...

In this paper, we examine the impact of market activity on the percentage bid-ask spreads of S&P 100 index options using transactions data. We propose a new market microstructure theory which we call derivative hedge theory, in which option market percentage spreads will be inversely related to...

We propose a dynamic competitive equilibrium model of limit order trading, based on the premise that investors cannot monitor markets continuously. We study how limit order markets absorb transient liquidity shocks, which occur when a significant fraction of investors lose their willingness and...

We study the properties of the carry trade, a currency speculation strategy in which an investor borrows low-interest-rate currencies and lends high-interest-rate currencies. This strategy generates payoffs which are on average large and uncorrelated with traditional risk factors. We argue that...

This paper builds on the landmark contribution of Glosten (1994) by treating the determination of limit order supply schedules as an exercise in asset pricing theory with the possible sizes of incoming market orders as the value-relevant states of nature, yielding an analogue of the Fundamental...