There is a paucity of research on discouraged small businesses, their reinvestment decisions, and the role of firm size and relationships on credit availability for small businesses internationally. The three essays included in this dissertation investigate these issues with a unique firm-level...

We investigate the impulse response path through which an information or liquidity shock reveals itself first in depths and then in subsequent adjustments of the spread. Our three-equation error correction model investigates the equilibrium properties of spread and depth adjustment. In...

We take a closer look at the question of whether dual traders in futures markets are indeed informed traders. Underpinning this question is the intuition that a dual trader's decision to trade on his own account is not random, but is endogenously determined by his expectations of trading profits...

Using proprietary audit trail transaction data compiled by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, we investigate, at the individual trader level, (1) the timing and (2) the determinants of dual traders' personal trades. Our analysis reveals an absence of any trade timing by dual traders in...

Using audit trail transaction data compiled by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), we seek to ascertain directly the motives behind dual traders' own account trading and whether or not they are informed traders. We estimate our system of equations on each of the 101 most active dual...

We use a unique firm-level survey database compiled by the World Bank in order to examine the drivers of discouraged small businesses in various economics around the world. We find that level of competition and the relationships with banks and other financial institutions have significant impact...

The goal of this paper is to further our understanding of how relationships work in the borrower-lender interaction for a loan. A practical implication emerging from classical studies is that lenders overcome the problem of information asymmetry by collecting information about the borrowers...

We examine the determinants of the realized bid-ask spread in the U.S. corporate, municipal and government bond markets for the years 1995 to 1997, based on newly available transactions data. Overall, we find that liquidity is an important determinant of the realized bid-ask spread in all three...

Using a carefully constructed matched sample of control (nondecimal) stocks, we isolate the effects of decimalization for a sample of NYSE-listed common stocks trading in decimals. We find that the quoted depth as well as the quoted and effective bid-ask spreads declined significantly following...