Financial markets face the constant threat of cyber attacks. We develop a principal-agent model of cyber-attacking with fee-paying clients who delegate security decisions to financial platforms. We derive testable implications about clients' vulnerability to cyber attacks and about the fees...

In financial markets, clients entrust their capital and data to financial infrastructure providers who are vulnerable to breaches. We develop a model in which infrastructure providers compete to provide secure and efficient client services, in the presence of a cyber-attacker. In equilibrium,...

Latency delays — known as “speed bumps” — slow the execution of orders at an exchange, often to protect market makers against latency arbitrage. We study informed trading in a fragmented market, where one exchange introduces a latency delay on market orders. While liquidity improves at...

Many investors rely on brokers to route their orders to exchanges. Exchanges charge fees to the broker who routes the order, rather than to the investor. Brokers have an incentive to route based on the fees, instead of the execution quality experienced by their clients. This conflict of interest...

Financial markets face the constant threat of cyber attacks. We develop a principal-agent model of cyber-attacking with fee-paying clients who delegate security decisions to financial platforms. We derive testable implications about clients' vulnerability to cyber attacks and about the fees...

Using bond futures data, we test whether high-frequency trading (HFT) is engaging in back running, a trading strategy that can create costs for financial institutions. We reject the hypothesis of back running and find instead that HFT mildly improves trading costs for institutions. After a rapid...

This discussion paper is the third in the Financial Markets Department's series on the structure of Canadian financial markets. These papers are called "ecologies" because they study the interactions among market participants, infrastructures, regulations and the terms of the traded contract...

This paper presents four blue-sky ideas for lowering the cost of the Government of Canada's debt without increasing the debt's risk profile. We argue that each idea would improve the secondary-market liquidity of government debt, thereby increasing the demand for government bonds and thus...