News Archive

Financial markets routinely experience a variety of frictions that hinder their efficient functioning by impacting price formation. These frictions are usually due to how trading is organized in a market, regulatory constraints, or trading capital. EconPol expert Sophie Moinas (TSE) and her co-authors propose an empirical investigation of the dynamic relationships between funding and market illiquidity measures in the European Treasury bond market. They find that funding illiquidity shocks affect bond market illiquidity and of a weaker, but significant, reverse feedback effect. Their analysis also shows that the responses of individual bonds' market illiquidity to funding illiquidity shocks increase with bond duration, the credit risk of the issuer, and with haircuts.

Traditional retail banking (and, by default, shadow banking) is built on four pillars: SME lending, access to public liquidity, deposit insurance, and prudential supervision. But many shadow financial institutions (money market mutual funds, hedge funds and investment banks) gained access to public liquidity facilities during the 2008 crisis. In this working paper, EconPol expert Jean Tirole and his co-author Emmanuel Farhi, ask whether, in the light of recent developments, it is time to reconsider the time-honored SME lending/regulation/ public liquidity access/ deposit insurance quadrilogy?

Why are macroeconomic imbalances so important in the Eurozone and can the European Commission’s Macroeconomic Imbalances Procedure (MIP) address them? EconPol expert Roberto Tamborini examines critical and alternative views of this procedure. A common thread across alternative views is that the right approach to problems arising from capital movements across a monetary union is the so-called Banking Union, not the MIP. Overall, its critics all contend that the MIP, together with other Eurozone regulations, is conceived as a substitute for (good) federal government that we do not have (or want).

Liquidity issues in financial markets arise because of two main factors: asymmetric information and cost of market participation. To alleviate these frictions, several exchanges start with a pre-opening period characterized by the accumulation of orders and the absence of trading. What is the role of Euronext’s pre-opening mechanism in the price discovery and liquidity formation of the exchange itself versus two other competing venues deprived of such a mechanism, namely BATS and Chi-X? EconPol expert Sophie Moinas (TSE) and her co-authors find evidence that tentative clearing prices set during the pre-opening period contribute to discover opening price; and that tentative clearing volume is positively correlated with liquidity across all three platforms.

Over the past decade major regulatory changes in the US and Europe to promote competition among trading venues have made today’s financial markets more fragmented and complex than ever. Information technology, infrastructure enhancement, and arbitrage strategies all help to link trading venues. This EconPol Working Paper, co-authored by EconPol researcher Sophie Moinas, uses a two-venue duopoly model involving strategic risk-averse market-makers to explore a new cross-market linking channel: the interdependence of liquidity providers' inventory costs.