Market microstructure deals with the purest form of financial intermediation – the trading of a financial asset, such as a stock or a bond. In a trading market, assets are not transformed but are simply transferred from one investor to another. The field of market microstructure studies the...

We elaborate economic explanations for the time-varying risk of month, quarter and year base load electricity forward contracts traded on the Nord Pool Energy Exchange from January 2006 to March 2010. Daily risk quantities are generated by decomposing realized volatility in its continuous and...

This paper examines the impact of foreign participation in Korean Treasury Bond (KTB) futures and its role in price discovery for KTBs, using daily transactions data from the over-the-counter market for KTBs and from the Korea Exchange for the futures. Our analysis suggests that foreign trading...

We propose a nonparametric Bayesian approach for the estimation of the pricing kernel. Historical stock returns and option market data are combined through the Dirichlet Process (DP) to construct an option-adjusted physical measure. The precision parameter of the DP process is calibrated to the...

The recent financial crisis renewed concerns about a possible destabilizing impact of derivatives trading. Despite a very active research, the question whether or not derivatives tend to destabilize financial markets has not yet been answered to satisfaction. This contribution aims to revise the...

The article examines microstructure issues in the Australian Interbank futures market by analyzing the price adjustment process following scheduled Cash Target Rate announcements by the Reserve Bank of Australia. In characterizing the market response, three distinct stages of price formation and...

We propose two new risk measures (i-beta and i-gamma) for a stock, which aim to distinguish between noise and information. Noise allows the stock price evolution to happen along a continuous path. Market wide economic information is transmitted via price jumps. Noise is idiosyncratic and does...

This paper focuses on the effects of political uncertainty and the political process on implied stock market volatility during U.S. presidential election cycles. Using monthly Iowa Electronic Markets data over five elections, we document that stock market uncertainty, as measured by the VIX...

We study the intra-day impact of algorithmic trading on the futures market to increase our understanding of algorithmic trading and its role in the price formation process. First, we find that algorithmic trading provides liquidity when the spread is wide and that algorithms enter the market at...

This article describes the primary uses of the VIX index in the financial literature, offering for the first time a joint view of its successes and failures in key financial areas. VIX is a model-free volatility index that measures the investor "fear" gauge due to its significant and negative...