This paper argues that securities transaction taxes "throw sand" not in the wheels, but into the engine of financial markets where the transformation of latent demands into realized transactions takes place. The paper considers the impact of transaction taxes on financial markets in the context...

The Flash Crash of May 6, 2010, shook the confidence of market participants and raised questions about the market structure of electronic markets. In these markets, intraday intermediation has been increasingly provided by market participants without formal obligations to do so. We examine...

This paper provides cross-country empirical evidence on the productivity of bank transaction taxes (BTTs). Our data set comprises six Latin American countries that have levied BTTs since the late 1980s: Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Venezuela. We find that, for a given tax rate,...