Essays on Liquidity and Information

Essays on Liquidity and Information PDF Author: Pablo Daniel Kurlat
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ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 131

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This dissertation studies the interaction of liquidity and incomplete or asymmetric information. In Chapter 1, I study a dynamic economy with illiquidity due to adverse selection in financial markets. Investment is undertaken by borrowing-constrained entrepreneurs. They sell their past projects to finance new ones, but asymmetric information about project quality creates a lemons problem. The magnitude of this friction responds to aggregate shocks, amplifying the responses of asset prices and investment. Indeed, negative shocks can lead to a complete shutdown in financial markets. I then introduce learning from past transactions. This makes the degree of informational asymmetry endogenous and makes the liquidity of assets depend on the experience of market participants. Market downturns lead to less learning, worsening the future adverse selection problem. As a result, transitory shocks can create highly persistent responses in investment and output. In Chapter 2, I study why firms can choose to be illiquid. Optimal incentive schemes for managers may involve liquidating a firm following bad news. Fragile financial structures, vulnerable to runs, have been proposed as a way to implement these schemes despite their ex-post inefficiency. I show that in general these arrangements result in multiple equilibria and, even allowing arbitrary equilibrium selection, they do not necessarily replicate optimal allocations. However, if output follows a continuous distribution and creditors receive sufficiently precise individual early signals, then there exists a fragile financial structure such that global games techniques select a unique equilibrium which reproduces the optimal allocation. In Chapter 3, I study speculative attacks against illiquid firms. When faced with a speculative attack, banks and governments often hesitate, attempting to withstand the attack but giving up after some time, suggesting they have some ex-ante uncertainty about the magnitude of the attack they will face. I model that uncertainty as arising from incomplete information about speculators' payoffs and find conditions such that unsuccessful partial defenses are possible equilibrium outcomes. There exist priors over the distribution of speculators' payoffs that can justify any possible partial defense strategy. With Normal uncertainty, partial resistance is more likely when there is more aggregate uncertainty regarding agents' payoffs and less heterogeneity among them.

Essays on Liquidity and Information

Essays on Liquidity and Information PDF Author: Pablo Daniel Kurlat
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 131

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Book Description
This dissertation studies the interaction of liquidity and incomplete or asymmetric information. In Chapter 1, I study a dynamic economy with illiquidity due to adverse selection in financial markets. Investment is undertaken by borrowing-constrained entrepreneurs. They sell their past projects to finance new ones, but asymmetric information about project quality creates a lemons problem. The magnitude of this friction responds to aggregate shocks, amplifying the responses of asset prices and investment. Indeed, negative shocks can lead to a complete shutdown in financial markets. I then introduce learning from past transactions. This makes the degree of informational asymmetry endogenous and makes the liquidity of assets depend on the experience of market participants. Market downturns lead to less learning, worsening the future adverse selection problem. As a result, transitory shocks can create highly persistent responses in investment and output. In Chapter 2, I study why firms can choose to be illiquid. Optimal incentive schemes for managers may involve liquidating a firm following bad news. Fragile financial structures, vulnerable to runs, have been proposed as a way to implement these schemes despite their ex-post inefficiency. I show that in general these arrangements result in multiple equilibria and, even allowing arbitrary equilibrium selection, they do not necessarily replicate optimal allocations. However, if output follows a continuous distribution and creditors receive sufficiently precise individual early signals, then there exists a fragile financial structure such that global games techniques select a unique equilibrium which reproduces the optimal allocation. In Chapter 3, I study speculative attacks against illiquid firms. When faced with a speculative attack, banks and governments often hesitate, attempting to withstand the attack but giving up after some time, suggesting they have some ex-ante uncertainty about the magnitude of the attack they will face. I model that uncertainty as arising from incomplete information about speculators' payoffs and find conditions such that unsuccessful partial defenses are possible equilibrium outcomes. There exist priors over the distribution of speculators' payoffs that can justify any possible partial defense strategy. With Normal uncertainty, partial resistance is more likely when there is more aggregate uncertainty regarding agents' payoffs and less heterogeneity among them.

Essays on Liquidity in Financial Markets

Essays on Liquidity in Financial Markets PDF Author: John Brendan McDermott
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ISBN:
Category : Investments
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Three Essays on

Three Essays on PDF Author: Ethan D. Watson
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ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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This dissertation consists of three essays on cancelling liquidity, information generation and learning by holding private placements, and information generation, learning and the trading dynamics of institutional traders during the 2007-2008 financial crisis. The first essay examines cancellation activity of limit orders. We document a two-fold increase in limit order cancellation activity over the last decade, and study the determinants of cancellations and the change in cancellation activity through time. We also examine the impact of order cancellation on market quality. We use an instrumental variable approach and estimate a simultaneous equations model to overcome simultaneity in the trading process. We find significant differences in cancellation activity in the post Reg NMS environment, and differences in cancellation activity between exchanges. However, we fail to find evidence that the increase in cancellations is detrimental to market quality, despite concerns from regulators and traders. In the second essay we examine how relationships influence trading behavior. Specifically, we study whether or not financial intermediaries (insurance companies) produce information via relationships with publicly traded firms established by investing in the public firm's privately placed securities (privately placed debt, or equity). We contribute to the literature that asserts that financial intermediaries generate information via relationships that they establish with their clients. We find some evidence that suggests insurers do generate information via the private placement relationship and use this information to trade. In the third essay, we study if institutional traders acquire information from the assets that they hold and how this impacts trading decisions around the 2007-2008 financial crisis. Specifically, we test if insurance companies who hold mortgages exhibit different trading behavior in their mortgage backed securities portfolio than insurers who do not hold mortgages. We examine insurers' trading behavior in light of several theories of how institutions trade during crisis periods. We document that insurers who hold mortgages have higher odds of being net disposers of MBSs prior to the crisis, than are other insurers. We also find that, on average, insurers exhibited a flight to safety during the crisis.

Two essays on liquidity. Essay I

Two essays on liquidity. Essay I PDF Author: Wei-Xuan Li
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Essays on Liquidity in Financial Markets

Essays on Liquidity in Financial Markets PDF Author: Pierre-Olivier Weill
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 358

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Essays on Information, Liquidity and Financial Frictions

Essays on Information, Liquidity and Financial Frictions PDF Author: Wukuang Cun
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Financial crises
Languages : en
Pages : 139

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This dissertation seeks to understand how financial frictions arise and how they can affect the economy, and explores the implications of financial frictions for monetary policy during crises. Specifically, Chapter 2 and 3 study the endogenous nature of information asymmetry and explore its implications for financial markets and the macro economy. Chapter 4 studies the potential side effects of large scale asset purchase by central banks. In Chapter 2, I study a dynamic economy in which the information on asset quality is asymmetric and the degree of information asymmetry endogenously varies with the macro-economy, which amplifies the effects of shocks. In the model, firms hold assets of heterogeneous quality and borrow for operating expenses. Production is subject to idiosyncratic shocks, which may force the firms to liquidate their assets to pay off debts. Firms are initially uninformed of the qualities of their assets, but they can acquire private information on their own assets at a cost. Private information is individually beneficial, but it creates a lemons problem that lowers market liquidity and distorts economic decisions. Adverse shocks trigger private information acquisition, which exacerbates the lemons problem. As results, market liquidity drops and economic activity declines. The model can generate larger fluctuations in financial and macroeconomic variables than an otherwise the same model with the level of information asymmetry being fixed. In Chapter 3, I provide a possible explanation for the countercyclical movements in the measures of asset return volatility. In the model, external financing is costly due to the information asymmetry between borrowers and lenders. When the borrowers' financial conditions are worsened, the costs of external financing rise. Borrowers respond by increasing their transparency to outside investors to mitigate information asymmetry, which helps reduce the external financing cost. As a result, returns on external financing instruments disperse and fluctuate more as more information is disclosed, leading to increases in the cross sectional dispersion and the time series volatility of returns. This model can generate countercyclical dispersion, volatility in returns and external finance premium, with correlation coefficients between pairs of these measures quantitatively in line with the data. In Chapter 4, I explore the potential side effects of central bank asset purchase. In the model, commercial banks and shadow banks hold liquid assets as part of their operations. Asset purchases by the central bank decreases the supply of liquid assets that shadow banks can directly hold. When commercial banks do not face binding leverage constraints, shadow banks respond by increasing their deposits in or credit lines from commercial banks and central bank asset purchases are neutral. In the presence of a binding leverage constraint, however, asset purchases create distortions that decrease shadow banks' liquidity holdings and their lending. While conventional wisdom says that central bank asset purchases should be expansionary, I show that central bank asset purchases are necessarily contractionary when the level of bank reserves is high.

Essays on Liquidity, Traders' Strategies and the Usefulness of Accounting Information

Essays on Liquidity, Traders' Strategies and the Usefulness of Accounting Information PDF Author: Pietro Perotti
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ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Three Essays on Stock Market Liquidity and Earnings Seasons

Three Essays on Stock Market Liquidity and Earnings Seasons PDF Author: Andrei I. Nikiforov
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Electronic dissertations
Languages : en
Pages : 136

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In these essays, I identify the effects of earnings seasons (i.e., the clustering of earnings releases), on stock market liquidity and asset pricing. In the first essay, I document strong seasonal regularities associated with aggregate earnings announcements. Applying the large body of literature linking earnings announcements to liquidity effects, I argue that these earnings seasons create market-wide liquidity shocks and I show that both liquidity betas and liquidity risk change during earnings seasons In the second essay, I test the impact of earnings seasons on commonality in liquidity as measured by both spreads and depths. I find that commonality significantly decreases during the four weeks of each calendar quarter when most companies release their earnings. These findings contribute to the literature by identifying and examining the clustering effect of firm-specific information on commonality in liquidity. In the third essay, I extend the study of the liquidity effects of earnings seasons to a sample of 20 countries. I find that the international data corroborate both hypotheses. I also find that the aggregate quality of accounting information, and the duration and frequency of interim reporting periods are important determinants of the liquidity effects (both liquidity betas and commonality in liquidity) during earnings seasons.

Essays on Liquidity in Financial Markets

Essays on Liquidity in Financial Markets PDF Author: Christoph Koser
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 141

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"This dissertation contributes to a better understanding of liquidity in financial markets. Relying on the latest proxies for liquidity and TAQ benchmark data, this dissertation investigates liquidity in financial markets from different perspectives and gives answers to crucial challenges when assessing the importance of liquidity; its time-varying commonality across assets and stock markets; its impact on asset pricing in abnormal market states and finally its dynamics and determinants on a daily basis. This study has implications for investors and market makers as part of risk management and portfolio diversification and for policy makers in the context of designing optimal regulatory frameworks to predict and prevent common sources of liquidity tightness in global financial markets. In the second chapter, I study commonality in liquidity and its association to market volatility. Taking on a global perspective on this matter and examining nine major stock markets, I first construct a novel and dynamic measure of commonality in liquidity. I show that liquidity commonality is present in global stock markets and increases parallel to crisis periods. This finding points towards abrupt changes in liquidity fundamentals and clearly provide evidence for demand- and supply-driven sources of commonality in liquidity (i.e. correlated trading behavior on institutional level paired with restrictions on funding capital) on a global scale. Driven by the well acknowledged findings of a positive relationship between volatility and illiquidity, I investigate the time-varying tie between common variation in liquidity and volatility. Using a dynamic granger-causality test, I find that global market volatility always causes commonality in liquidity while commonality in liquidity causes volatility only in sub-periods, spanning over the financial crisis and its aftermath period. In the third chapter, I examine the effect of systemic liquidity risk as a priced risk factor in asset pricing. Hereby, I challenge the previous literature in their finding of a linear relationship between systemic liquidity risk and asset prices. I show that systemic liquidity risk is not always a priced factor in the explanation of asset prices. I find that systemic liquidity risk and asset prices are negatively associated in bad market states. This finding can be explained by downward trended liquidity spirals, in other words, an interaction between demand and supply-sided commonality in liquidity, which cause a depression in asset pricing during bad market states. I also show that liquidity risk has a positive link to asset pricing in good market states, which is mainly associated with search-for-yield considerations. Finally, I document that there is no significant relationship between systemic liquidity risk and asset pricing during normal market swings. This finding supports the initial claim that market participants do not worry too much about the state of market-wide liquidity during regular times. In the fourth chapter, I investigate daily liquidity and trading activity of energy stocks traded at U.S. stock exchanges, categorized into five energy sectors, that is, oil and gas, coal mining, renewables, electric- and multi-utilities. Using TAQ (trades and quotes) data, I examine various dimensions of liquidity and trading - effective spreads, price impact of trades, number of trades and volume - on sectoral level. I document cross-sectional differences in the level of liquidity and trading across energy stock segments. I find that liquidity and trading is trended and exhibit serial dependency up to higher lags, similarly across sectors. There is a weekly pattern for trading and liquidity, both decline on Fridays, on average. I also identify a number of factors that affect trading and liquidity commonly across sectors, that is, general market movements, short-term momentum runs and overall stock market volatility, which points again towards the direction of correlated trading, amplified by institutional investors. Moreover, I show that trading and liquidity are sensitive to a widening Term Spread. I find a heterogeneous effect of the oil price on liquidity and trading activity, dependent on the energy segment. Despite controlling for stock market volatility, I observe that illiquidity and trading increase with higher levels of oil price volatility. Finally, I show that trading activity, both, in number of trade executions and share volume, increases for renewable and multi-utility stocks when climate change receives global media attention. Fast markets and increased trading make liquidity to be one of the top considerations in the smooth functioning of financial markets, especially in the light of financial distress and sudden, downward trended liquidity spirals, where liquidity adjusts to different equilibria levels. For future discussion, there is further need to address liquidity in its different dimensions and in the context of financial market quality, information efficiency and sentiment. This dissertation is yet another step for a more comprehensive knowledge on liquidity." -- TDX.

Essays in Liquidity

Essays in Liquidity PDF Author: Pamela C. Moulton
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 145

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