We argue for incorporating the financial economics of market microstructure into the financial econometrics of asset return volatility estimation. In particular, we use market microstructure theory to derive the cross-correlation function between latent returns and market microstructure noise,...

We propose and estimate a model of endogenous informed trading that is a hybrid of the PIN and Kyle models. When an informed trader trades optimally, both returns and order flows are needed to identify information asymmetry parameters. Empirical relationships between parameter estimates and...

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...

Sudden big price changes are followed by periods of high and persistent volatility. I develop a tractable dynamic rational expectations model consistent with this observation. An infinity of agents possess dispersed information about future dividends and trade in centralized markets. Information...

The ad hoc Black-Scholes (AHBS) model is one of the most widely used option valuation models among practitioners models. The main contribution of this study is methodological. We have two main results: (1) we make the empirical observation that typically the call and put sneers are discontinuous...

We find that weekend, holiday and overnight trading breaks generate excessive perceived risk in the option markets, presumably due to asymmetric information, which, in turn, encourages uninformed option traders to postpone trading. This perceived risk subsides after two days accompanied by an...

Economists and financial analysts have begun to recognise the importance of the actions of other agents in the decision-making process. Herding is the deliberate mimicking of the decisions of other agents. Examples of mimicry range from the choice of restaurant, fashion and financial market...

The estimation of market impact is crucial for measuring the information content of trades and for transaction cost analysis. Hasbrouck's (1991) seminal paper proposed a Structural-VAR (S-VAR) to jointly model mid-quote changes and trade signs. Recent literature has highlighted some pitfalls of...

We propose a parsimonious agent-based model of a financial market at the intra-day time scale that is able to jointly reproduce many of the empirically validated stylised facts. These include properties related to returns (leptokurtosis, absence of linear autocorrelation, volatility clustering),...