Limit order books (LOBs) match buyers and sellers in more than half of the world's financial markets. This survey highlights the insights that have emerged from the wealth of empirical and theoretical studies of LOBs. We examine the findings reported by statistical analyses of historical LOB...

The European Union Emissions Trading Scheme is the key policy instrument of the European Commission's Climate Change Program aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions to eight percent below 1990 levels by 2012. The key asset traded under the scheme is the European Union allowance (EUA). This...

We analyze the impact of high frequency (HF) trading in financial markets based on a model with three types of traders: liquidity traders (LTs), professional traders (PTs), and high frequency traders (HFTs). Our four main findings are: i) The price impact of liquidity trades is higher in the...

To execute a trade, participants in electronic equity markets may choose to submit limit orders or market orders across various exchanges where a stock is traded. This decision is influenced by the characteristics of the order flow and queue sizes in each limit order book, as well as the...

This paper analyzes how a stock's liquidity, turnover, volatility and returns are driven by short term fluctuations in investor attention. Attention-grabbing stocks are identified by their daily Google Search Volume. A newly developed download algorithm allows the creation of a search volume...

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...

Two important characteristics of current equity markets are the large number of competing trading venues with publicly displayed order books and the substantial fraction of dark trading, which takes place outside such visible order books. This paper evaluates the impact on liquidity of dark...

Two important characteristics of current equity markets are the large number of competing trading venues with publicly displayed order books and the substantial fraction of dark trading, which takes place outside such visible order books. This paper evaluates the impact on liquidity of dark...

We investigate whether market makers with inventory concerns are compensated with subsequent monthly returns in the cross-section. We find a significant negative relation between order flows and monthly returns, “the order flow effect”, suggesting that market makers lower prices for stocks...

This paper examines data from 45 world markets and shows that the previously documented relation between mean returns and idiosyncratic volatility arises because of biases in volatility estimates that we can attribute to the bid-ask bounce in trade prices. We show that no significant relation...