We study empirically how competition among high-frequency traders (HFTs) affects their trading behavior and market quality. Our analysis exploits a unique dataset, which allows us to compare environments with and without high-frequency competition, and contains an exogenous event - a tick size...

We examine empirically the role of high-frequency traders (HFTs) in price discovery and price efficiency. Based on our methodology, we find overall that HFTs facilitate price efficiency by trading in the direction of permanent price changes and in the opposite direction of transitory pricing...

We show that limited dealer participation in the market, coupled with an informational friction resulting from high frequency trading, can induce demand for liquidity to be upward sloping and strategic complementarities in traders' liquidity consumption decisions traders demand more liquidity...

Earlier research has shown that euro-area primary public debt markets affect secondary markets. We find that more successful auctions of euro area public debt, as captured by higher bid-to-cover ratios, lead to lower secondary-market yields following the auctions. This effect is stronger when...

During 2005-2006, the Chinese government implemented a reform aimed at eliminating the so-called non-tradable shares (NTS) typically held by the State or by politically connected institutional investors that were issued at the early stage of financial market development. Our analysis, based on...

We study the effects on the stock market of a securities transaction tax (STT). In particular, we focus on the recent introduction of a STT in Italy. Indeed, a peculiarity of the Italian STT is that it only concerns stocks of corporations with a market capitalization above 500 million euros. We...

Market participants often invest in order to acquire information that pertains to the market itself (e.g. order flow) rather than to fundamentals. This enables them to infer more information from past trades. I show that agents trading on such information, typically high-frequency traders,...

How do financial markets price new information? This paper analyzes price setting at the intersection of private and public information, by testing whether and how the reaction of financial markets to public signals depends on the relative importance of private information in agents' information...

A growing body of literature analyses the impact of news on companies’ equity prices. We add to this literature by showing that the transmission channel of news to prices differs across sectors. First, we disentangle sectoral equity prices into components of expected future earnings and equity...

We study the dynamics of a Lucas-tree model with finitely lived agents who "learn from experience." Individuals update expectations by Bayesian learning based on observations from their own lifetimes. In this model, the stock price exhibits stochastic boom-and-bust fluctuations around the...