Related Securities, Allocation of Attention and Price Discovery: Evidence from NYSE-Listed Non-U.S. Stocks

In this paper we explore how the composition of a market maker's portfolio and allocation of attention across securities in the portfolio affect pricing. We analyze whether more attention devoted to similar securities enables a market maker to extract information relevant to a stock from order flow to related securities and consequently whether it leads to improved price discovery of the stock. We base on the recent literature on allocation of attention in share trading (Corwin and Coughenour, 2008; Boulatov et al., 2009) and define the prominence of a security as the proportion of its dollar volume in the total volume of the specialist portfolio it belongs to. Our empirical tests are focused on New York Stock Exchange specialists and the U.S. share in price discovery of 64 British and French companies cross-listed on the NYSE. We define related securities as stocks from the same country, the same region or other foreign stocks. We find strong evidence that an increase in the prominence of related stocks in the specialist portfolio leads to a higher U.S. share in price discovery of our sample stocks. We interpret our findings as evidence that concentrating market makers in similar stocks reduces information asymmetries and improves the information environment. To support our argument, we show that an increase in the prominence of other foreign stocks in the specialist portfolio significantly reduces the adverse selection component of the bid-ask spread.NYSE specialists, cross-listing, related stocks, price discovery

Expropriation risk by block holders, institutional quality and expected stock returns

We study the asset pricing implications arising from imperfect investor protection using a new governance measure. This is defined as the product of institutional quality in a country and the proportion of free float shares, which captures the impact of controlling block holders. Using monthly returns of 4756 blue chip firms from 50 international equity markets for 13 years, we show through tests of variants of the augmented-CAPM, that a two factor CAPM augmented with a factor mimicking portfolio based on our new investor protection metric yields the highest explanatory power, especially for markets that exhibit true variation in ownership types

Order flow and exchange rate dynamics: an application to emerging markets

The paper examines short-run exchange rate dynamics in an emerging market based on the recent microstructure framework of foreign exchange markets where the main explanatory variable is the order flow of end-user customers. The study makes two main contributions to the literature: it modifies the basic microstructural FX model to take account of key features of the majority of emerging markets, namely the existence of a black market for FX and the presence of market inefficiencies; and it uses a unique database covering almost the complete Ghanaian market, and for a long time span compared with previous studies. We find that the unexpected component of order flow has a positive and long-lived effect on the official exchange rate in both stable and crisis periods, consistent with the basic microstructural approach. The price impact of unexpected order flow is related to the level of liquidity in the market. Expected order flow also impacts the exchange rate, suggesting inefficiencies in the market

Country and Time Variation in Exchange Rate Pass Through: What Drives it?

A large sample of developed and emerging economies is utilized to investigate import exchange rate pass-through. Panel models reveal that various economic aspects of the destination country can explain about one third of the total variation in pass-through elasticities and the remaining variation comes largely in the form of unobserved country-specific effects. Inflation, exchange rate volatility, openness and relative wealth play a clear role as drivers of emerging markets’ pass-through whereas the output gap and protectionism appear influential more generally. Nonlinearity regarding large-versus-small changes in the exchange rate is quite pervasive. Our evidence challenges the widely-held view that pass-through has been universally falling in developed markets and that it is higher for emerging markets. The economic drivers are shown to play a role as out-of-sample predictors of pass-through. The findings confirm pricing-to-market theories and have implications for the optimal conduct of monetary policy

On the integrated behaviour of non-stationary volatility in stock markets

This paper analyses the behaviour of volatility for several international stock market indexes, namely the SP 500 (USA), the Nikkei (Japan), the PSI 20 (Portugal), the CAC 40 (France), the DAX 30 (Germany), the FTSE 100 (UK), the IBEX 35 (Spain) and the MIB 30 (Italy), in the context of non-stationarity. Our empirical results point to the evidence of the existence of integrated behaviour among several of those stock market indexes of different dimensions. It seems, therefore, that the behaviour of these markets tends to some uniformity, which can be interpreted as the existence of a similar behaviour facing to shocks that may affect the worldwide economy. Whether this is a cause or a consequence of market globalization is an issue that may be stressed in future work.Comment: 10 pages, 3 figures. Paper presented in the APFA 5 conferenc

On the integrated behaviour of non-stationary volatility in stock markets

This paper analyses the behaviour of volatility for several international stock market indexes, namely the SP 500 (USA), the Nikkei (Japan), the PSI 20 (Portugal), the CAC 40 (France), the DAX 30 (Germany), the FTSE 100 (UK), the IBEX 35 (Spain) and the MIB 30 (Italy), in the context of non-stationarity. Our empirical results point to the evidence of the existence of integrated behaviour among several of those stock market indexes of different dimensions. It seems, therefore, that the behaviour of these markets tends to some uniformity, which can be interpreted as the existence of a similar behaviour facing to shocks that may affect the worldwide economy. Whether this is a cause or a consequence of market globalization is an issue that may be stressed in future work.Comment: 10 pages, 3 figures. Paper presented in the APFA 5 conferenc

Global liquidity, house prices and policy responses

The paper investigates the impact of global liquidity on house prices around the world using a novel proxy measured by the funding availability to global banks in the main financial centers. We find supporting evidence that global conditions from the financial centers are transmitted to local banks through bank flows. Focusing on the repo markets in the US, Europe, and the UK, over the period 2000-2014 and using a panel VAR, we find that liquidity shocks impact house prices in both emerging and advanced economies. However, countries’ exposure to liquidity shocks can be mitigated by monetary policy, and by various general and house market specific macroprudential policies. We document strikingly different effectiveness of these policies in advanced and emerging markets