We analyse the impact of two major financial frictions on market quality in a high-frequency environment: market fragmentation and exchange fees. We find fragmentation significantly improves market quality, with benefits increasing with greater fragmentation. Fragmentation significantly reduces...

We develop a framework for assessing security market quality (MQ), relating five elements of market design to three metrics of market integrity and two metrics of market efficiency. We empirically implement this integrity-efficiency MQ framework by testing a hypothesis that trade-based ramping...

Notwithstanding that regulatory mandates require that all security market design changes pass the dual test of fairness and efficiency, most regulators have not even defined efficiency let alone fairness. It should therefore come as little surprise why design changes such as the introduction of...