A tool that has been widely used to identify the state of financial conditions in a country are the financial conditions indexes, since they synthesize information from different variables in a single indicator allowing to identify the general behavior of financial conditions in a timely and...

We investigate the determinants of bid-ask spreads on corporate credit default swaps (CDSs). We find that proxies for dealer inventory costs such as variability of CDS premia and CDS trading volume explain as much as 80% of variation in CDS bid-ask spreads. We also analyze the influence of...

Security Transaction Tax (STT) was introduced in the Indian capital market in 2004. It is a tax on transaction of equities as well as their derivatives. Despite the reduction in STT over the years, it constitutes a large percentage (next only to brokerage fee) of the total cost of trading. The...

We develop a new likelihood-based approach to signing trades in the absence of quotes. This approach is equally efficient as the existing Markov-chain Monte Carlo methods, but more than ten times faster. It can address the occurrence of multiple trades at the same time and allows for analysis of...

Easley / Kiefer / O'Hara / Paperman (1996) (EKOP) have proposed an empirical methodology that allows to estimate the probability of informed trading and that has subsequently been used to address a wide range of issues in market microstructure. The data needed for estimation is the number of...

By employing the modified net buying pressure as a measure of informed option trading, this study tested whether option trading around quarterly earnings announcements is either directionally motivated and/or volatility motivated. We found evidence that is consistent with the idea that option...

We cross-sectionally analyze the presence of aggregated hidden depth and trade volume in the S&P 500 and identify its key determinants. We find that the spread is the main predictor for a stock's hidden dimension, both in terms of traded and posted liquidity. Our findings moreover suggest that...

This paper looks at the dynamic price relationship between spreads in the corporate bond market and credit default swaps (CDS). It picks up where Blanco et al (2005) leave off but is focused on European credit markets. The study is based on companies listed in the iTraxx CDS index and thus on...

The trading of securities on multiple markets raises the question of each market's share in the discovery of the informationally efficient price. We exploit salient distributional features of multivariate financial price processes to uniquely determine these contributions. Thereby we resolve the...

We consider a multi-period rational expectations model in which risk-averse investors differ in their information on past transaction prices (the ticker). Some investors (insiders) observe prices in real-time whereas other investors (outsiders) observe prices with a delay. As prices are...