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Working Paper
Machines vs. Machines: High Frequency Trading and Hard Information
In today's markets where high frequency traders (HFTs) act as both liquidity providers and takers, I argue that information asymmetry induced by liquidity-taking HFTs' use of machine-readable information is important. This particular type of information asymmetry arises because some machines may access the information before other machines or because of randomness in relative speed. Applying a novel statistical approach to measure HFT activity through limit order book data and using a natural experiment of index inclusion, I show that liquidity-providing HFTs supply less liquidity to stocks ...
Working Paper
Bond Market Intermediation and the Role of Repo
This paper models the important role that repurchase agreements (repos) play in bond market intermediation. Not only do repos allow dealers to finance their activities, but they also increase dealers' ability to satisfy levered client demands without having to adjust their holdings of risky assets. In effect, the ability to borrow specific assets for delivery allows dealers to source large quantity of assets without taking ownership of them. Larger levered client orders imply larger asset borrowing demands, thus increasing the borrowing cost for the asset (i.e., repo specialness). Dealers ...
Working Paper
Cheapest-to-Deliver Pricing, Optimal MBS Securitization, and Market Quality
We study optimal securitization and its impact on market quality when the secondary market structure leads to cheapest-to-deliver pricing in the context of agency mortgage-backed securities (MBS). A majority of MBS are traded in the to-be-announced (TBA) market, which concentrates trading of heterogeneous MBS into a few liquid TBA contracts but induces adverse selection. We find that lenders segregate loans of like values into separate pools and tend to trade low-value MBS in the TBA market and high-value MBS outside the TBA market. We then present a model of optimal securitization for agency ...
Working Paper
Customer Liquidity Provision : Implications for Corporate Bond Transaction Costs
The convention in calculating trading costs in corporate bond markets is to assume that dealers provide liquidity to non-dealers (customers) and calculate average bid-ask spreads that customers pay dealers. We show that customers often provide liquidity in corporate bond markets, and thus, average bid-ask spreads underestimate trading costs that customers demanding liquidity pay. Compared with periods before the 2008 financial crisis, substantial amounts of liquidity provision have moved from the dealer sector to the non-dealer sector, consistent with decreased dealer risk capacity. Among ...
Report
All-to-All Trading in the U.S. Treasury Market
While the U.S. Treasury market remains the deepest and most liquid securities market in the world, several episodes of abrupt deterioration in market functioning over recent years have brought the market’s resilience into focus. The adoption of all-to-all trading in the Treasury market could be one avenue to strengthen market resilience. Conceptually, all-to-all trading would allow any market participant to trade directly with any other market participant. This could be particularly helpful in times of stress, when the capacity of traditional intermediaries may be tested. In this paper, we ...