Recently, the Shanghai Futures Exchange (SHFE) introduced gold futures trading in China. This paper is the first to study the SHFE gold futures, and to evaluate the futures hedging effectiveness since the introduction. The results show that hedging with gold futures reduces the variance of a...

This paper investigates how the introduction of a closing call auction in the OMXS 30 index futures market influences market quality and price accuracy. Index futures markets are characterized by traders with no or little private information. Limit order book models where trader patience (rather...

The regulatory debate concerning high-frequency trading (HFT) emphasizes the importance of distinguishing different HFT strategies and their influence on market quality. Using data from NASDAQ-OMX Stockholm, we compare market-making HFTs to opportunistic HFTs. We find that market makers...

This paper estimates a conditional version of the liquidity adjusted CAPM by Acharya and Pedersen (2005) using NYSE and AMEX data from 1927 to 2010 to study the illiquidity premium and its variation over time. The components of the illiquidity premium is in this model derived as the level of...

Fast trading and fragmentation of volume make equity markets complex, leading retail and institutional investors to demand sophisticated brokerage services. In a sample of stock transactions in Swedish large-cap firms, we find that brokers who show high trading sophistication when trading their...

How does information get revealed in decentralized markets? We test several hypotheses inspired by recent dealer-network theory. To do so we construct an empirical map of information revelation where two dealers are connected based on the synchronicity of their quote changes. The tests, based on...

We study performance and competition among high-frequency traders (HFTs). We construct measures of latency and find that differences in relative latency account for large differences in HFTs' trading performance. HFTs that improve their latency rank due to colocation upgrades see improved...

Volatility extensions in closing auctions are designed to improve the efficiency of the closing price. We hypothesize that the channel for the efficiency increase is that extensions improve market integrity and investor trust in the auction mechanism. We confirm that the introduction of a...

Financially constrained firms can use hedging to lower the risk of financial distress. However, spending scarce resources on hedging exacerbates the underinvestment problem of these firms. We develop a model in which this cost of hedging is traded off against a reduction in the risk of being...

The effective bid-ask spread measured relative to the spread midpoint overstates the true effective bid-ask spread in markets with discrete prices and elastic liquidity demand. The average bias is 13-18% for S&P 500 stocks in general, depending on the estimator used as benchmark, and up to 97%...