We study how derivatives (with nonlinear payoffs) affect the liquidity of the underlying asset. In a rational expectations equilibrium, informed investors expect low conditional volatility and sell derivatives to the others. These derivative trades affect investors’ utility differently,...

Post-crisis bank regulations raised market-making costs for bank-affiliated dealers. We show that this can, somewhat surprisingly, improve overall investor welfare and reduce average transaction costs despite the increased cost of immediacy. Bank dealers in OTC markets optimize between two...

Algorithmic trading has sharply increased over the past decade. Equity market liquidity has improved as well. Are the two trends related? For a recent five-year panel of New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) stocks, we use a normalized measure of electronic message traffic (order submissions,...

We study price pressures in stock prices-price deviations from fundamental value due to a risk-averse intermediary supplying liquidity to asynchronously arriving investors. Empirically, twelve years of daily New York Stock Exchange intermediary data reveal economically large price pressures. A...

We model the execution of large uninformed sell orders in the presence of strategic competitive market makers. We solve for the unique symmetric equilibrium of the model in closed-form. Our equilibrium findings provide a rationale for the empirically observed patterns of (i) short orders...

We investigate the effects of introducing a central clearing counterparty (CCP) on securities prices by adopting as an experimental construct the 2009 CCP reform in three Nordic markets. We find that, relative to other European economies, these countries experience market-adjusted equity returns...

Speeding up the exchange does not necessarily improve liquidity. The price quotes of high-frequency market makers are more likely to meet speculative high-frequency "bandits", thus less likely to meet liquidity traders. The bid-ask spread is raised in response. The recursive dynamic model...