The subject of our study is market liquidity, which is an important element of the functioning of financial markets. Adequate liquidity of markets is of great significance from the point of view of both market participants and the central bank. On the one hand, of all market segments an...

This paper makes use of a natural experiment of the U.S. Treasury Department to examine the relationship between Treasury security issue size and liquidity. Treasury bills that were first issued with fifty-two weeks to maturity and then reopened at twenty-six weeks are shown to be more liquid...

Special stock market segments for small company shares were established by all major European stock exchanges during the 1980's. After showing a remarkable success during the first years of their existence - both in the primary as well as in the secondary market - these segments today suffer...

This paper studies the impact of counter-party default risk of forward contracts on a firm's production and hedging decisions. Using a model of a risk-averse competitive firm under price uncertainty, it derives several fundamental results. If expected profits from forward contracts are zero, the...

This paper examines the cross-dynamics of volatility term structures implied by foreign exchange options. The data used in the empirical analysis consist of daily observations of implied volatilities for OTC options on the euro, Japanese yen, British pound, Swiss franc, and Canadian dollar,...

During the last decade, markets for covered warrants (bank-issued options) have flourished in Europe and Asia. In these markets, investors often face a choice between many instruments that differ only slightly from each other. Based on retail trades in call options on the German DAX index, this...

The OTC derivatives markets all over the world have shown tremendous growth in recent years. In the wake of the present financial crisis, which is believed to have been exacerbated by OTC derivatives, increasing attention is being paid to analysing the regulatory environment of these markets. In...

Clearinghouses support financial trades by keeping records of transactions and by providing liquidity through short-term credit that is periodically cleared by participants. We study efficient clearing arrangements for formal exchanges, where traders must clear with a clearinghouse, and for...

We explain why central counterparties (CCPs) emerged historically. With standardized contracts, it is optimal to insure counterparty risk by clearing those contracts through a CCP that uses novation and mutualization. As netting is not essential for these services, it does not explain why CCPs...