We use the introduction of a cost on high message to trade ratios for traders at the Oslo Stock Exchange to investigate the effects on market quality and fragmentation of introduction of such ``speed bumps'' to equity trading. The exchange introduced a fee payable by market participants whose...

A recent innovation in equity markets is the introduction of market maker ser-vices paid for by the listed companies themselves. We investigate why firms arewilling to pay a cost to improve the secondary market liquidity of their shares. Weshow that a contributing factor in this decision is the...

We investigate the information content of aggregate stock market liquidity and askwhether it may be a useful realtime indicator, both for nancial stress, and real economicactivity in Norway. We describe the development in a set of liquidity proxies at the OsloStock Exchange (OSE) for the period...

Existing evidence using US data show a simultaneous covariability between a stock’s priceand quarterly flows into and out of the stock by institutional investors. In this paper we usedata on monthly changes in holdings by all investor groups at the Oslo Stock Exchange toshow that such...

We document a strong relation between stock market liquidity and the businesscycle. Stock market liquidity worsens when the economy is slowing down, and thiseffect is most pronounced for small firms. Using data for both the US and Norway,we show that stock market liquidity predicts the current...

We investigate the information content of aggregate stock market liquidity and ask whether it may be a useful realtime indicator, both for financial stress, and real economic activity in Norway. We describe the development in a set of liquidity proxies at the Oslo Stock Exchange (OSE) for the...

In recent years, a number of electronic limit order markets have reintroduced market makers for some securities (Designated Market Makers). This trend has mainly been initiated by financial intermediaries and listed firms themselves, without any regulatory pressure. In this paper we ask why...

We investigate the information content of aggregate stock market liquidity and ask whether it may be a useful realtime indicator, both for financial stress, and real economic activity in Norway. We describe the development in a set of liquidity proxies at the Oslo Stock Exchange (OSE) for the...

Existing evidence using US data shows a simultaneous covariability between a stock's price and quarterly flows into and out of the stock by institutional investors. In this paper we use date on monthly changes in holdings by all investor groups at the Oslo Stock Exchange to shown that the...

We empirically investigate the costs of trading equity at the Oslo Stock Exchange in the period 1980--2008. We show the time series evolution of different measures of (implicit) trading costs: bid/ask spreads, the Roll(1984) measure and the Lesmond et al (1999) measure. We find a clear time...