This paper studies a recent tick size reduction in the U.S. Treasury securities market and identifies its effects on the market's liquidity and price efficiency. Employing difference-indifference regressions, we find that the bid-ask spread narrows significantly after the change, even for large...

The share of market making conducted by high-frequency trading (HFT) firms has been rising steadily. A distinguishing feature of HFTs is that they trade intraday, ending the day flat. To shed light on the economics of HFTs, and in a departure from existing market-making theories, we model an HFT...

Ever since the emergence of regular and predictable issuance of coupon-bearing Treasury debt in the 1970s, thirty years has marked the outer boundary of Treasury bond maturities. However, longer-term bonds were not unknown in earlier years. Seven such bonds, including one with a forty-year term,...

According to most theories of financial intermediation, intermediaries diversify risk, transform maturity or liquidity, and screen or monitor borrowers. In U.S. Treasury auctions, none of these rationales apply. Intermediaries submit their customer bids without transforming liquidity or...

We document a highly significant, strongly nonlinear dependence of stock and bond returns on past equity-market volatility as measured by the VIX. We propose a new estimator for the shape of the nonlinear forecasting relationship that exploits additional variation in the cross section of...

We document the emergence of a disconnect between mortgage and Treasury interest rates in the summer of 2003. Following the end of the Federal Reserve's expansionary cycle in June 2003, mortgage rates failed to rise according to their historical relationship with Treasury yields, leading to...

"This paper empirically analyzes the Expectations Hypothesis (EH) in inflation-indexed (or real) bonds and in nominal bonds in the US and in the UK. We strongly reject the EH in inflation-indexed bonds, and also confirm and update the existing evidence rejecting the EH in nominal bonds. This...

We introduce liquidity frictions into an otherwise standard DSGE model with nominal and real rigidities, explicitly incorporating the zero bound on the short-term nominal interest rate. Within this framework, we ask: Can a shock to the liquidity of private paper lead to a collapse in short-term...