Regulators, exchanges, and politicians are considering reining in maker-taker pricing, which is used as a competitive tool by trading venues to acquire order flow. Examining the 2013 reduction in trading fees operated by BATS on its European venues, we document significant effects on market...

The current research assesses the risks commonly attributed to the presence of HFT in the context of different market structures deployed by the U.S. exchanges. In particular, we find that, by design, the so-called “normal” exchanges have the lowest market quality, including the highest...

Competition for order flow is widely documented for U.S. markets, but is a relatively new phenomenon in European equities trading. Only with the Markets in Financial Instruments Directive, which went into effect in November 2007, did new trading venues emerge in Europe that for the first time...

We analyze the equilibrium spread when the transaction size of informed traders is elastic in the value of private information (α). We show that the pooling equilibrium is likely to be inefficient when trade size is sensitive to α and the inefficient equilibrium can occur before the market...

Empirical evidence indicates that trades by institutional investors have sizable effects on asset prices, generating phenomena such as index effects, asset-class effects and others. It is difficult to explain such phenomena within standard representative-agent asset pricing models. In this...

Competition among trading platforms has considerably reduced trading fees in stock markets. We show that this evolution is not necessarily beneficial to investors. Obviously it increases gains from trade when a trade happens. Less obviously, it can induce investors to post limit orders with a...

Hidden orders are offered by many lit trading venues for participants to hide the true size of their orders. To help a risk-neutral trader executing a target volume to minimize the execution cost by benefitting from the setting of a limit order market allowing hidden orders, we propose a...

The financial services industry is among the leading industries in IT-spending. Still, little research exists which investigates how IT influences the financial services sector. Against this background, we study how a technology which emerged within the last years affects securities trading:...

We study the consequences of high-frequency trading (HFT) — and potential policy responses — via the tradeoff between liquidity and information production. Faster speeds facilitate HFT with consequences for this tradeoff: information production diminishes because informed traders have less...

This article provides an overview of recent legal developments related to spoofing in financial markets and an analysis of economic issues related to spoofing. The Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010 defines spoofing as “bidding or offering with the intent to...