We study how political factors shape competition in the mobile telecommunication sector. We show that the way a government designs the rules of the game has an impact on concentration, competition, and prices. Pro-competition regulation reduces prices, but does not hurt quality of services or...

Cellular technologies have become increasingly important in the developing world; infrastructure for mobile networks has expanded dramatically over the past two decades giving access to remote areas without previous phone service. Despite this expansion, relatively little is known about the...

While much economic policy presumes that more information infrastructure yields higher economic returns, little empirical work measures the magnitudes of these returns. We examine investment by local exchange telephone companies in fiber optic cable, ISDN lines and signal seven software,...

We introduce the financial economics of market microstructure into the financial econometrics of asset return volatility estimation. In particular, we use market microstructure theory to derive the cross-correlation function between latent returns and market microstructure noise, which feature...

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...

Classical statistics suggest that for inference purposes one should always use as much data as is available. We study how the presence of market microstructure noise in high-frequency financial data can change that result. We show that the optimal sampling frequency at which to estimate the...

We present a model in which the microstructure of trade in a commodity or asset is endogenously determined. Producers and consumers of a commodity (or buyers and sellers of an asset) who wish to trade can choose between two competing types of intermediaries: 'middlemen' (dealer/brokers) and...

Using recent advances in the econometrics literature, we disentangle from high frequency observations on the transaction prices of a large sample of NYSE stocks a fundamental component and a microstructure noise component. We then relate these statistical measurements of market microstructure...

This paper establishes several intra-day patterns of the high-frequency exchange rate behavior, using the firm bid-ask quote, transaction of the EBS data set. First, the activity of quote and transactions is high in the beginning hours of the three major currency markets -- Tokyo, London, and...

It is a common practice in finance to estimate volatility from the sum of frequently-sampled squared returns. However market microstructure poses challenges to this estimation approach, as evidenced by recent empirical studies in finance. This work attempts to lay out theoretical grounds that...