Existing empirical evidence is inconclusive on whether professional investors show sophisticated behavior or not, a question which is at the heart of market efficiency. This ambiguous evidence is mostly based on trading data or laboratory evidence, which each has its limitations. We complement...

This paper examines the roles of order flow (reflecting private information) and news (reflecting public information) in explaining exchange rate volatility. Analyzing four months of a bank's high frequency dollar/euro trading, three different kinds of order flow are used in addition to seasonal...

There are strong calls for the introduction of a "Tobin tax" on foreign exchange (FX) transactions. Despite its popularity, research has not yet made full use of available insights from the recent microstructure literature. The role of banks in FX trading is quite different from the assumptions...

This paper describes and analyzes “automated intervention” of a target zone. Unusually detailed information about the order book allows studying intervention effects in a microstructure approach. We find in our sample that intervention increases exchange rate volatility (and spread) for the...

Financial liberalisation has often failed in the past due to underestimated problems of structural change. We analyse such changes in lending behaviour of Thai commercial banks during a liberalisation phase by way of unique micro data. Liberalisation has expected positive effects, such as...

There are robust gender differences in the domains of risk taking, overconfidence and competition behavior. However, as expertise tends to level these differences, we ask whether financial experts still show gender dissimilarities in their domains of decision making? We analyze survey responses...