In an initial coin offering, investors fund a venture in exchange for tokens that grant rights to future economic output. To many financial industry insiders, tokens have no intrinsic merit and exist only as a way to evade regulations. We demonstrate that generic revenue-based token contracts...

Using a change in regulatory fees in Canada in April, 2012, that affected predominantly high-frequency market makers (HFMMs), we analyze the causal impact of their activity on trading costs. The message fee caused the number of trades, quotes, and cancellations to drop by 30% driven by a...

Facing increased competition, over the last decade many stock exchanges changed their trading fees to maker-taker pricing, an incentive scheme that rewards liquidity suppliers and charges liquidity demanders. Using a change in trading fees on the Toronto Stock Exchange, we study whether and why...

Blockchain or, more generally, distributed ledger technology allows to create a decentralized digital ledger of transactions and to share it among a network of computers. In this paper, we argue that the implementation of this technology in financial markets offers investors new options for...

We examine the impact of a rule in the Canadian equities market that requires dark orders to offer price improvement over displayed orders. We show that this rule eliminated intermediation of retail orders in the dark and shifted retail orders onto the lit market with the lowest trading fee....

In a dynamic model of financial market trading multiple heterogeneously informed traders choose when to place orders. Better informed traders trade immediately, worse informed delay even though they expect the public expectation to move against them. This behavior causes distinct patterns with...

As equity trading becomes predominantly electronic, is there still value to a traditional, intermediated dealer system? We address this question by comparing the impact of the organization of trading on volume, liquidity, and price efficiency in a quote-driven dealer market and in an...

Blockchain-based decentralized exchanges (DEXes) are a pre-requisite for the nascent decentralized finance ecosystem. The most successful form of DEX in terms of trading volume are swap exchanges, smart contracts that pool liquidity and that price transactions with a deterministic function....

Global economic digitization continues to advance at exponential speed. This development is in sharp contrast to the financial sector and payment systems that still operate on legacy infrastructure that lacks the flexibility to serve those technology needs. Further, the emergence of...

We develop a tractable continuum player timing game that subsumes wars of attrition and pre-emption games, in which greed and fear relax the last and first mover advantages. Payoffs are continuous and single-peaked functions of the stopping time and quantile. Time captures the payoff-relevant...