Ananth Madhavan

Market Microstructure: A Survey

Market microstructure is the area of finance that studies the process by which investors’ latent demands are ultimately translated into prices and volumes. This paper reviews the theoretical, empirical and experimental literature on market microstructure with a special focus on informational issues relating to: (1) Price formation and price discovery, including both static issues such as the determinants of trading costs and dynamic issues such the process by which prices come to impound information over time, (2) Market structure and design, including the relation between price formation and trading protocols, (3) Information and disclosure, especially the topic of market transparency, i.e., the ability of market participants to observe information about the trading process, and (4) Interface of market microstructure with other areas of finance including asset pricing, international finance, and corporate finance. I discuss the implications of recent research for academics, investors, policy makers, and regulators.

Transactions costs and investment style: an inter-exchange analysis of institutional equity trades

This paper examines the magnitude and determinants of transactions costs for a sample of institutional traders with different investment styles. Using order-level data for recent equity transactions totaling

Anatomy of the Trading Process: Empirical Evidence on the Behavior of Institutional Traders

83 billion, we find that trading costs are economically significant and increase with trade difficulty. In addition, costs vary with traderspecific factors such as investment style and order submission strategy, as well as stock-specific factors such as exchange listing. We find evidence that institutional trades in exchange-listed stocks have lower costs than in comparable Nasdaq stocks.

International Cross-listing and Order Flow Migration: Evidence from an Emerging Market

This paper examines the behavior of institutional traders using unique data on the equity transactions of 21 institutions of differing investment styles during 1991-1993. The data provide a detailed account of the anatomy of the trading process, and include information on the number of days needed to fill an order and types of order placement strategies employed. We analyze the motivations for trade, the determinants of trade duration, and the choice of order type. The analysis provides some support for the predictions made by theoretical models, but suggests that these models fail to capture important dimensions of trading behavior.

A Bayesian model of intraday specialist pricing

Policymakers in emerging markets are increasingly concerned about the consequences for the domestic equity market when companies list stock abroad. We show that the effects of cross-listing depend on the quality of intermarket information linkages. We investigate these issues with unique data from the Mexican equity market. The impact of cross-listing is complex-balancing the costs of order flow migration against the benefits of increased intermarket competition. These effects are exacerbated by equity investment barriers that induce segmentation of the domestic equity market. Consequently, the benefits and costs of cross-listing are not evenly spread over all classes of shareholders. Copyright The American Finance Association 1998.

Liquidity, Volatility, and Equity Trading Costs Across Countries and Over Time

Abstract This paper develops and tests a model of intraday security price movements which incorporates the effects of both trading volume and unanticipated information. We estimate our model using transaction data from a NYSE specialist and find strong evidence of information asymmetry, although the inventory effect appears weak. The parameter estimates are used to compute the costs of trading, and we find that implicit bid-ask spreads were significantly higher in October 1987 than in the rest of that year. We also examine large-block versus smaller trades and buyer-initiated versus seller-initiated trades.

An empirical analysis of NYSE specialist trading

Actual investment performance reflects the underlying strategy of the portfolio manager and the execution costs incurred in realizing those objectives. Execution costs, especially in illiquid markets, can dramatically reduce the notional return to an investment strategy. This paper examines the interactions between cost, liquidity and volatility, and analyses their determinants using panel data for 42 countries from September 1996 to December 1998. We document wide variation in trading costs across countries; emerging markets, in particular, have significantly higher trading costs even after correcting for factors such as market capitalization and volatility. We analyse the inter-relationships between turnover, equity trading costs and volatility, and investigate the impact of these variables on equity returns. In particular, we show that increased volatility, acting through costs, reduces a portfolios expected return. However, higher volatility reduces turnover also, mitigating the actual impact of higher costs on returns. Further, turnover is inversely related to trading costs, providing a possible explanation for the increase in turnover in recent years. The results demonstrate that the composition of global efficient portfolios can change dramatically when cost and turnover are taken into account. Copyright 2001 by Blackwell Publishers Ltd.

Country and Currency Risk Premia in an Emerging Market

Abstract This paper examines empirically the magnitude and determinants of dealer trading by NYSE market makers (specialists) across stocks and over time. Across stocks, specialist dealer trading varies widely and is inversely related to trading volume and proxies for off-exchange competition. Over time in an individual stock, specialists participate more actively as sellers (buyers) when holding long (short) inventory positions. This results suggest that dealers control their inventory positions by selectively timing the size and direction of their trades rather than by adjusting their quotes. Further, specialists participate more in smaller trades and when the bid–ask spread is wide.

Intertemporal price discovery by market makers: Active versus passive learning

The magnitude and determinants of credit and currency risks are topics of considerable importance. This paper uses data on peso- and dollar-denominated debt issued by the Mexican government to identify currency and country risk premia. We show that shocks in equity and debt market returns translate into long-term increases in the premium demanded by investors with respect to currency and country factors. Country and currency premia help explain equity returns and closed-end fund discounts. Additional evidence is provided showing that investors did not anticipate the magnitude or timing of the currency devaluation of December 1994 and the subsequent financial crisis.

Open Sesame: Alternative Opening Algorithms in Securities Markets

Abstract This paper demonstrates that market makers have the ability and incentive to facilitate price discovery in securities markets. Market makers can expedite the process of intertemporal price formation by setting prices to induce statistically more informative order flow. Such actions constitute an investment in the production of information. Under certain conditions, market makers can recoup the cost of this investment by making better pricing decisions in the future with more precise information. These conditions are analyzed in a general model and several examples that illustrate the complex nature of price discovery are presented.