This report looks backwards to the worldwide use of (enhanced) lender of last resort (LOLR) and market maker of last resort (MMLR) facilities during the global financial and the pandemic crises. It discusses how LOLR and MMLR facilities have worked; looking ahead, it considers what benefits and...

This working paper was written by Max Bruche (Humboldt University of Berlin) and John C.F. Kuong (INSEAD).We consider a model in which dealers intermediate trades between clients and provide immediacy, or, market liquidity. Dealers can exert unobservable effort to improve the chance of...

Prior research has established that the presence of designated market makers (DMMs) in an electronic open limit order book increases liquidity. We analyze whether the presence of additional DMMs results in a further improvement in liquidity. Using data from Deutsche B ̈orse’s Xetra system we...

Designated market makers (DMMs) are contractually obligated to increase liquidity provision when trading volume breaches a floor. Using this feature in a regression discontinuity design, we show that increased DMM participation facilitates price informativeness with respect to earnings news....

We jointly model investors' allocation of order flow among over-the-counter dealers and dealers' acquisition of expertise that increases their ability to take advantage of investors across transactions. Investors choose dealers based on their level of expertise and the liquidity they are...

There is an increasing concern that fast trading firms magnify adverse selection costs and illiquidity by picking off stale quotes. This article investigates the effects of banning proprietary traders from liquidity taking on the banned and the market overall. The fast arbitrageur exited the...

The widespread use of market-making algorithms in electronic over-the-counter markets may give rise to unexpected effects resulting from the autonomous learning dynamics of these algorithms. In particular the possibility of `tacit collusion' among market makers has increasingly received...

We show that (electronic) designated market makers are not necessarily beneficial to the stock market during ash crashes. They actually consume liquidity when it is most needed, even if they are rewarded by the exchange to provide immediacy. This behavior exacerbates the transient price impact,...

We run an experiment where professional traders, endowed with private information, trade an asset over multiple periods. After the trading game, we gather information about the professional traders' characteristics by having them carry out a series of tasks. We study which of these...

We investigate electronic trading among customers under normal market conditions and during the Covid-19 crisis using a unique data sample of U.S. corporate bond transactions from UBS Bond Port. We show that electronic customer-to-customer (C-to-C) trading is beneficial in terms of costs for...

Many equity markets combine continuous trading and call auctions. Oftentimes designated market makers (DMMs) supply additional liquidity. Whereas prior research has focused on their role in continuous trading, we provide a detailed analysis of their activity in call auctions. Using data from...

We propose a new model of trading in OTC markets. Dealers accumulate inventories by trading with end-investors and trade among each other to reduce their inventory holding costs. Core dealers use a more efficient trading technology than peripheral dealers, who are heterogeneously connected to...

An AI analyst we build to digest corporate financial information, qualitative disclosure, and macroeconomic indicators are able to beat the majority of human analysts in stock price forecasts and generate excess returns compared to following human analysts. In the contest of “man vs...

We propose a new model of trading in OTC markets. Dealers accumulate inventories by trading with end-investors and trade among each other to reduce their inventory holding costs. Core dealers use a more efficient trading technology than peripheral dealers, who are heterogeneously connected to...

We show that uninformed corporate bond index trackers pay lower transaction costs when they request immediacy from dealers with central network positions. This centrality discount supports recent network models in which core dealers have a comparative advantage in carrying inventory. We show...

We use data on the stock trades of a large number of individual investors to study how tax incentives affect the realization of capital gains and losses. We compare investors' realizations in their taxable and tax-deferred accounts, which allows us to identify tax-motivated trading. We reach...

We directly compare retail investor execution costs with exchange execution costs. We find off-exchange retail trades execute at lower effective spreads than comparable exchange trades, primarily due to the uninformed nature of retail trades. These results hold when payment for order flow (PFOF)...

Automated market makers (AMMs) are algorithms that pool liquidity and make it available to liquidity takers by automatically and algorithmically determining an execution price of a trade. In the recent markets for digital assets, a growing number of blockchain-based decentralized exchanges (DEX)...

We examine the economic mechanisms that limited arbitrage between the cash and forward markets of agency MBS, and whether asset purchases of the Federal Reserve (Fed) alleviated price dislocations. We find that the cash-forward basis, or the price difference between the cash and forward markets...

We study optimal trading strategy of a market maker with stock inventory in the presence of short-term market changes, especially changes in trading intensity of market participants and stock volatility. We employ Poisson jump processes in modelling such market condition changes. We provide...

Using granular data about government bonds, we find that dealer networks undergo significant changes after the arrival of new public information. Following the release of macroeconomic data, dealer intermediation increases, the dealers' inventory changes and more bonds circulate through the...

We study a unique data set of all client trades that the six largest Canadian dealers sent to U.S. equity markets in 2014-2015. Contrary to the public perception, Canadian dealers use U.S. markets only lightly and send less than 5% of their $-volume to the U.S.; on 60% of security-day...

A growing number of blockchain-based decentralized exchanges have adopted automated market makers to attract liquidity, and they replace the traditional order book system for trade execution. This paper studies the equilibrium liquidity provision via constant product market makers, one of the...

We examine how professional traders behave in two financial market experiments; we contrast professional traders' behavior to that of undergraduate students, the typical experimental subject pool. In our first experiment, both sets of participants trade an asset over multiple periods after...

Do competition and incentives offered to designated market makers (DMMs) improve market liquidity? Using data from the NYSE Euronext Paris, we show that an exogenous increase in competition among DMMs leads to a significant decrease in quoted and effective spreads, mainly through a reduction in...

The efficiency of financial markets and their potential to produce bubbles are central topics in academic and professional debates. Yet, little is known about the contribution of financial professionals to price efficiency. We run 116 experimental markets with 412 professionals and 502 students....

We examine how professional traders behave in two financial market experiments; we contrast professional traders' behavior to that of undergraduate students, the typical experimental subject pool. In our first experiment, both sets of participants trade an asset over multiple periods after...

We augment a simple inventory model with new features of the post-crisis regulations to offer new predictions on the effects of post-crisis regulations on the over-the-counter markets. First, the increased capital requirements of Basel III lead to an overall increase in order rejection rates of...

We consider a model in which dealers intermediate trades between clients and provide immediacy, or, market liquidity. Dealers can exert unobservable effort to improve the chance of intermediating profitably. This moral-hazard friction impairs dealers' ability to raise external finance and hence...