Liquidity plays a crucial role in financial exchange markets. Markets typically create liquidity through spatial consolidation with specialist/market makers matching orders arriving at different times. However, continuous trading systems have an inherent weakness in the potential for...

The link between financial market concentration and stability is a topic of great interest to policymakers and other market participants. Are concentrated markets - those where a relatively small number of firms hold large market shares - inherently more prone to disruption? This article...

This paper analyzes the performance and balance-sheet characteristics of banks in post-war Lebanon for the years 1993 to 2000. Although we find that Lebanese banks are profitable, most of them had accounting return on assets (ROA) greater than one percent over most of our test period, they are...

The historical literature has traditionally paid much attention to the role of universal banking in the industrialization of Germany and has presumed, in line with Gerschenkron (1962), that the system gained preeminence in the late nineteenth century due to the general 'backwardness' of the...

Despite continued attempts by regulators to curtail abusive short sales and increase transparency, the pattern and practice of fraudulent manipulation continues to proliferate and threaten the capitalization of a wide variety of issuers within the securities market. Identifying a meaningful...

I examine the impact of cross-venue latency on market quality using a model of informed trader competition in a fragmented market. As cross-venue latency decreases, liquidity and price discovery improve while the expected profits of informed traders decline. Moreover, a fall in the latency of...

I develop a model that quantifies the profitability of trading from limit order data. This method allows for estimation of the effective number of market participants without the need for trader IDs or proprietary datasets. In addition, my framework can evaluate several different questions in...

In the late 1990s, as economists looked back the development period in Africa since 1970s, they put forward the notion “African growth tragedy” , meaning that Africa's poor growth and resulting low income is associated with low schooling, political instability, underdeveloped financial...

We investigate the geographical proximity of firms to their relationship banks. We find that Islamic banks are more remote to their borrowers. We also find that the probability for a firm to connect to a bank substantially decreases in distance, but that the choice along bank characteristics...

Theory predicts that since a firm with market power has more stable cash flows because of its ability to set prices in the product market, its stock price is less sensitive to order flow (Peress, 2010), which results in greater stock liquidity. We test this prediction on a large sample of firms...