This paper tries to provide a simple explanation for the empirical finding, documented here and also by Hau, Killeen and Moore (2002), that spreads in the spot USD/EUR market are substantially higher than those in the preceding DEM/USD foreign exchange market. The paper argues that it is...

This paper studies the high frequency reaction of the DEM/USD exchange rate to publicly announced macroeconomic information emanating from Germany and the U.S. The new content of each announcement is extracted using a set of market expectation figures supplied by MMS International. By using data...

Most of the existing empirical literature on FX market microstructure uses indicative quote data derived from Reuters EFX Screens. This paper examines the adequacy of such data as proxies for firm, tradeable quotes. We present a comparison of prices (and volumes) derived from Reuters D2000-2...

Under rational expectations and e±cient markets, the news contained in public information announcements is directly impounded into prices with there being no role for trades in this process of information assimilation. This paper directly tests this assertion using transaction level exchange...

We study the effects of sterilized intervention operations executed on behalf of the Swiss National Bank (SNB) using tick-by-tick transaction data between 1985-95.We extend preliminary analysis conducted by Fischer and Zurlinden (1999) by matching these data with intra-day indicative exchange...

Does it matter to market quality if broker identities are revealed after a trade and only to the two traders involved? We find that implementing full anonymity dramatically improves liquidity and reduces trader execution costs. To explain this, we compare theories based on asymmetric information...

We study the impact on market liquidity of the introduction of a penalty for high order-to-trade ratios (OTRs), implemented by the Italian Stock Exchange to curtail high-frequency quote submission. We find that the fee is associated with a collapse in the quoted depth of the stocks that make up...