We compare the stability and timeliness of credit ratings produced by a traditional issuer-paid rating agency (Moody's Investors Service) and a subscriber-paid rater (Rapid Ratings). Moody's ratings exhibit less volatility but are slower to identify default risk. We control for Moody's aversion...

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:...

The M&A transactions represent a wide range of unique business optimization opportunities in the corporate transformation deals, which are usually characterized by the high level of total risk. The M&A transactions can be successfully implemented by taking to an account the size of investments,...

With the introduction of the High Frequency Trading (HFT) Act in May 2013, Germany has become the first country that regulates securities trading firms based on their infrastructure and order book activity characteristics. In order to increase the transparency of HFT firms and to facilitate...

This working paper was written by Kalok Chan (Chinese University of Hong Kong Business School), F.Y. Eric Lam (Independent Researcher)*, Giorgio Valente (Hong Kong Institute for Monetary and Financial Research) and Siyuan Wu (Chinese University of Hong Kong Business School).Trading venues have...

This paper examines abnormal stock returns around the publication of 1,167 reports issued by 26 brokerage firms on 37 small caps admitted to listing on the Italian stock market from 2003 to 2011. The focus is on small caps going public because, for such firms, information asymmetries may be...

Exchange-traded fund (ETF) trading volumes have increased over the last decade and so have ETF settlement failures at the clearing corporation. We test the hypothesis that ETF short selling, high stock borrow prices, and options contract expiration contribute to ETF fails-to-deliver (FTDs). We...

We study a special form of securities market circuit breaker, i.e., European volatility interruptions. Instead of halt trading like traditional circuit breaker, these short-living call auctions allow for continual price discovery after price limit hits. Based upon approximately 1,800 Xetra...

This paper analyzes brief episodes of high-intensity quotes turnover and revision-"bursts" in quotes-in the U.S. equity market. Such events occur very frequently, several hundred times a day for actively traded stocks. We find significant price impact associated with these market makers...

Price impact measures the difference between the best quoted price and the realized price as a function of order size. This paper analyzes how price impact depends on the latency that a market maker is subject to. I propose a tractable model which allows incorporating both order size and latency...