is it time to split the s p 500 futures contract by october 1996 the value of the s p 500 index futures contract had grown to five times its value at its inception in april 1982 one way to make the contract more accessible to small investors and to smooth out trading is to split the contract splitting the contract could increase transaction costs although competition would probably limit the amount of the increase less clear is the need for increasing the minimum percentage tick size the current minimum tick size is small for s p 500 futures compared with that of other futures and also common stocks the larger tick size could affect volume however by increasing trading costs and reducing the willingness to trade

financial firm production of monetary services a generalized symmetric baroett variable profit function approach an alternative monetary production model of financial firms is employed to investigate supply side monetary aggregation financial firms are conceived to produce monetary services as outputs through financial intermediation a new method for testing the existence of consistent monetary output aggregates in financial firms production technology is developed in terms of a multiproduct firm s variable profit function and the method does not require homotheticity of the aggregator function we use a generalized symmetric barnett flexible functional form that specification satisfies global curvature conditions and retains its flexibility under the null hypothesis of weak separability neither of those properties is possessed by other flexible functional forms

cognitive limitation and investment performance evidence from limit order clustering we hypothesize that cognitive limitation may be manifested in a disproportionately large volume of limit orders submitted at round number prices if investors use these numbers as cognitive shortcuts using detailed limit order data in the taiwan futures exchange we find that investors with lower cognitive abilities defined as higher limit order submission ratios at round numbers suffer greater losses in their round numbered and non round numbered limit orders market orders and round trip trades the positive correlation between cognitive ability and investment performance is monotonic and robust across futures and options markets in addition past trading experience helps mitigate cognitive limitation

negotiation and the ipo offer price a comparison of integer vs non integer ipos we investigate the pricing of 4 989 equity ipos with offer dates between 1981 and 2000 approximately three fourths of these ipos have integer offer prices average initial returns for ipos with integer offer prices are significantly higher 24 5 than those priced on the fraction of the dollar 8 1 this result is robust through time and after conditioning for other effects known to influence initial returns we hypothesize that integer vs fractional dollar ipos are the result of negotiations between the issuing firm and underwriter under this negotiation hypothesis the frequency of integer pricing should be an increasing function of the offer price and the degree of uncertainty surrounding the value of the firm empirical evidence supportive of the negotiation hypothesis is presented

a day end transaction price anomaly a large mean price change is observed on the last daily nyse transaction this suggests that closing prices may not consistently represent stock values transaction prices are studied to further characterize the day end price rise and to determine whether it is due to any limited subsample of stocks or dates the results indicate that the phenomenon is pervasive over most firms and days some evidence suggests that it is caused by a change in the frequency of ask prices at day end

minimum price variations discrete bid ask spreads and quotation sizes exchange minimum price variation regulations create discrete bid ask spreads if the minimum quotable spread exceeds the spread that otherwise would be quoted spreads will be wide and the number of shares offered at the bid and ask may be large a cross sectional discrete spread model is estimated by using intraday stock quotation spread frequencies the results are used to project 1 16 spread usage frequencies given a 1 16 tick projected changes in quotation sizes and in trade volumes are obtained from regression models for stocks priced under 10 the models predict spreads would decrease 38 percent quotation sizes would decrease 16 percent and daily volume would increase 34 percent article published by oxford university press on behalf of the society for financial studies in its journal the review of financial studies

are risky assets substitutes for monetary assets i introduction financial innovation over the past couple of decades has enhanced the liquidity of many financial assets particularly noncapital certain risky assets further financial assets previously not regarded as monetary assets such as mutual funds and particularly money market mutual funds now provide monetary services such as liquidity and transactions services l given the increased liquidity of such funds the question arises as to whether risky assets are substitutes for capital certain monetary assets if noncapital certain assets are indeed substitutes for capital certain assets and are also being used for transactions purposes then agents may be treating risky assets as money although this issue has been addressed in the united states in the context of the addition of bond funds to m2 by for example duca 1995 no such research has yet been conducted in the united kingdom including risky assets in the analysis contradicts the work of ando and shell 1975 spencer 1986 appendix i pp 184 93 and spencer 1994 broadly they argue that since some nonrisky assets provide monetary services and probability also liquidity individuals would not hold risky assets for these purposes 2 in contrast hicks 1935 states that falling transaction costs and rising wealth encourages individuals to increase the proportion of risky assets in portfolio holdings most studies generally assume that risky assets fail to provide significant monetary services and for example have been excluded from the asset demand analysis of barr and cuthbertson 1991a drake fleissig and swofford 1997 and money demand studies such as taylor 1987 belongia and chrystal 1991 drake and chrystal 1994 and drake 1996 alternatively barr and cuthbertson 1991b use only risky assets in their asset demand system analysis the degree of substitution between risky assets and capital certain assets is an empirical issue while noncapital certain risky assets mutual funds and other financial assets may well be becoming closer substitutes for what people are using as money they are in no way perfect substitutes for the highly liquid cash assets to evaluate the role of noncapital certain assets we construct a noncapital certain risky divisia aggregate consisting of equities government bonds and unit trusts the divisia index allows for less than perfect substitution between assets and weights component assets according to their differing degrees of moneyness which may vary over time due to many factors for example financial innovation see barnett 1980 this methodology has been widely applied to monetary aggregation and money demand studies in a number of countries as in belongia 1996 drake 1996 drake and chrystal 1997 and anderson jones and nesmith 1997 to determine whether risky assets are substitutes for capital certain assets we use two other divisia aggregates constructed from traditional measures of money the first of these is an aggregate of highly liquid zero yield cash assets given that the component assets all have zero own rates of return however divisia aggregation is equivalent in this case to simple summation the second aggregate is a divisia aggregate of interest bearing capital certain assets including risky assets complicates the analysis because the degree of risk aversion will affect the estimates of substitution between capital certain and noncapital certain assets thus we also analyze how different degrees of risk aversion affect the results the substitution relationship between assets is estimated from an asymptotically ideal model aim the choice of an aim is in line with the recommendation of barnett fisher and serletis 1992 that flexible systems of demand equations should be used that allow for nonlinear optimizing behavior by economic agents furthermore this paper can be seen as an extension of the recent application of this model to u

do investors prefer even eighth prices evidence from nyse limit orders abstract using a large sample of limit orders on nyse stocks we find that investors submit more limit orders with even eighth prices than odd eight prices however even though there are a greater number of even eighth limit orders the proportion of executing limit orders submitted with even prices is greater than those submitted with odd prices for a large portion of our sample we find that clustering on even prices is a positive function of stock price and various proxies for the dispersion in investors reservation prices the preference for even prices affects stock quotes investors are more likely to submit a quote improving limit order if the limit price is even and quoted depth is higher for even quotes than for odd quotes

money demand variability a demand systems approach this article tests the fourier flexible form on quarterly u s monetary data the data have been prescreened for consistency with the general axiom of revealed preference and subindexes are formed using the divisia approach in this article the global fourier model fits well although there is a potential problem of overfitting and certain data points exhibit behavior inconsistent with the model the elasticities are variable over time particularly around business cycle troughs it appears that financial asset demand surfaces are highly nonlinear and the many unsuccessful existing attempts to estimate money demand may not have worked well for this reason

internalization and stock price clustering finnish evidence abstract internalization the practice of brokers executing trades in house is a significant phenomenon in the helsinki stock exchange during the continuous trading session 97 5 upstairs market trades are internalized the corresponding figure for after hours upstairs market trades is 73 1 the prices of internalized trades are somewhat more clustered than the prices of other trades during the continuous trading session but they are not more clustered than the prices of negotiated trades in the after hours upstairs market this suggests that finnish brokers do not use a more discrete set of prices for internalized trades than for other upstairs trades

stock price clustering and discreteness stock prices cluster on round fractions clustering increases with price level and volatility and decreases with capitalization and transaction frequency clustering is pervasive price clustering will occur if traders use discrete price sets to simplify their negotiations exchange regulations require that most stocks be traded on eighths clustering on larger fractions will occur if traders choose to use discrete price sets based on quarters halves or whole numbers an econometric model of clustering is derived and estimated projections from the results suggest that traders would frequently use odd sixteenths when trading low price stocks if exchange regulations permitted trading on sixteenths article published by oxford university press on behalf of the society for financial studies in its journal the review of financial studies

a note on the wang and wang measure of the quality of the compass rose abstract h wang and c wang visibility of the compass rose in financial asset returns a quantitative study j bank financ 26 2002 1099 1111 derive a measure of the visibility of the radial patterns that appear in a plot of current and past returns which are more commonly known as the compass rose in theory this measure should be positively related to the tick volatility ratio in practice however we find that this relationship does not hold for higher tick volatility ratios that are common to stock market data thus the use of this measure is limited in real world applications we propose a correction factor that improves the behaviour of the quality measure over higher tick volatility ratios however further research is required to fully identify and correct the problem

price clustering in bitcoin investor and media attention in bitcoin has increased substantially in recently years reflected by the incredible surge in news articles and considerable rise in the price of bitcoin given the increased attention there little is known about the behaviour of bitcoin prices and therefore we add to the literature by studying price clustering we find significant evidence of clustering at round numbers with over 10 of prices ending with 00 decimals compared to other variations but there is no significant pattern of returns after the round number we also support the negotiation hypothesis of harris 1991 by showing that price and volume have a significant positive relationship with price clustering at whole numbers

an analysis of substitution bias in measuring inflation 1959 851 we analyze the substitution bias in laspeyres type price indexes such as the cpi using 1959 1985 nipa consumption data for 101 commodities we employ two methodological approaches to calculation of the bias first we construct the tightest theoretical bounds on the col by applying nonparametric methods using algorithms developed by afriat and by varian second following diewert we construct superlative price index formulas namely tomqvist and fisher s ideal indexes under a chain as well as a fixed base specification homothetic preferences are found to be consistent with the data and sensitivity tests indicate that this result is not vacuous if the hypothesis of homotheticity is maintained the col bias has upper and lower limits of 0 22 and 0 14 percent per year respectively using the superlative indexes as the measure of the col the bias is about 0 18 percent per year for the period 1959 85 this estimate is somewhat larger than found in earlier studies our use of more disaggregated data is found to be responsible for part of the difference with the size of the estimated bias directly related to the extent of the aggregation

a comparison of nonparametric tests of weak separability for annual and quarterly data on consumption leisure and money among the most fundamental assumptions made in economics are utility maximization and the separability of the arguments in the representative consumer s utility function these assumptions are important for theoretical and empirical applications of economics in this article we present results from nonparametric tests of these assumptions of consumer behavior we find that utility maximization generally obtains with either annual or quarterly per capita data on consumption goods leisure and relatively liquid monetary assets annual data on consumption goods leisure and all monetary assets are consistent with utility maximization there is some evidence in support of using partial adjustment models when estimating quarterly data models of the demand for monetary assets further annual data on consumption goods and leisure and on liquid monetary assets meet the necessary and sufficient conditions for weak separability these results support the notion of a monetary aggregate more broadly based than cu

tick size share prices and stock splits minimum price variation rules help explain why stock prices vary substantially across countries and other curiosities of share prices companies tend to split their stock so that the institutionally mandated minimum tick size is optimal relative to the stock price a large relative tick size provides an incentive for dealers to make markets and for investors to provide liquidity by placing limit orders despite its placing a high floor on the quoted bid ask spread a simple model suggests that idiosyncratic risk firm size and visibility of the firm affect the optimal relative tick size and thus the share price in stock markets around the world the average price per share differs substantially the median u s stock for example sells for about 40 a typical london stock sells for about 5 7 50 and a typical hong kong share is about 2 furthermore when stock prices rise above a country s usual trading range firms often split their stocks to restore prices to that range why are these price ranges so different among countries these trading ranges can be remarkably stable over time during the half century from 1943 to 1994 the s p composite index increased over 1 500 percent yet the average new york stock exchange nyse share price was

imperfect competition in financial markets an empirical study of island and nasdaq the competition between island and nasdaq at the beginning of the century offers a natural laboratory to study competition between and within trading platforms and its consequences for liquidity supply our empirical strategy takes advantage of the difference between the pricing grids used on island and nasdaq as well as of the decline in the nasdaq tick using the finer grid prevailing on their market island limit order traders undercut nasdaq quotes much more than they undercut one another the drop in the nasdaq tick size triggered a drop in island spreads despite the island tick already being very thin before nasdaq decimalization we also estimate a structural model of liquidity supply and find that island limit order traders earned rents before nasdaq decimalization our results suggest that perfect competition cannot be taken for granted even on transparent open limit order books with a very thin pricing grid

the components of the illiquidity premium an empirical analysis of u s stocks 1927 2010 this paper implements a conditional version of the liquidity adjusted capm lcapm the conditional lcapm allows for a time varying decomposition of the total illiquidity premium into a level component and three risk components the estimated average annual total illiquidity premium for us stocks 1927 2010 is 1 74 2 08 which is substantially lower than in most previous studies the contributions from illiquidity level and illiquidity risk are 1 25 1 28 and 0 46 0 83 respectively of the three illiquidity risk components risk related to the hedging of wealth shocks is the most important while commonality risk is the least important the illiquidity premia are clearly time varying with peaks in downturns and crises but with no general tendency to decrease over time the level premium and the risk premium are significantly positively correlated at around 0 35 indicating that in periods of turbulence both illiquidity cost and illiquidity risk premia tend to be high

an explanation for the compass rose pattern abstract the compass rose pattern cannot be observed in daily returns in the spot foreign exchange forex market but is observable when intraday forex returns are used monte carlo simulations show that the pattern is visible only when the tick volatility ratio is above some threshold level a condition that is readily met with intraday returns

penny wise dollar foolish buy sell imbalances on and around round numbers this paper provides evidence that stock traders focus on round numbers as cognitive reference points for value using a random sample of more than 100 million stock transactions we find excess buying selling by liquidity demanders at all price points one penny below above round numbers further the size of the buy sell imbalance is monotonic in the roundness of the adjacent round number i e largest adjacent to integers second largest adjacent to half dollars etc conditioning on the price path we find much stronger excess buying selling by liquidity demanders when the ask falls bid rises to reach the integer than when it crosses the integer we discuss and test three explanations for these results finally 24 hour returns also vary by price point and buy sell imbalances are a major determinant of that variation across price points buying selling by liquidity demanders below above round numbers yield losses approaching 1 billion per year this paper was accepted by brad barber teck ho and terrance odean special issue editors

priced on the note the case of japanese ipos this article examines the pricing of japanese ipos 54 26 are priced in 1 000 japanese yen increments the japanese yen jpy has denominations of banknotes and coins banknotes are in 1 000 2 00

price clustering on the shanghai stock exchange abstractwe investigate price clustering of intraday trades and negotiated block trades on the shanghai stock exchange sse from 2003 to 2009 prices of traded assets tend to cluster on certain final digits such as 0 and 5 in chinese culture 8 is associated with good luck and 4 with death so these numbers may be attractive or avoided we find that price clustering on the final digit of 0 is significantly higher during the morning call auction and early in the trading day we find no evidence of price clustering for the digit 8 but there is a significant dearth of prices ending in the inauspicious number 4 price clustering is significantly higher for negotiated block trades for which about 28 end with 0 multivariate analysis shows that price clustering is lower for more liquid firms but higher for firms with higher return volatility a higher price level or when the market is volatile our evidence supports the costly negotiation hypothesis our results also support the attraction hypothesis in t

market reaction to public information the atypical case of the boston celtics abstract the publicly traded boston celtics limited partnership shares provide a unique means of studying the impact of information on equity prices the results of the celtics basketball games significantly affect partnership share returns trading volume and volatility controlling for the expectedvalue of the signal using betting market point spreads has little effect on these relations investors respond asymmetrically to wins and losses and playoff games have a larger impact on returns than regular season games opening prices do not fully reflect game results consistent with previous findings that significant volatility is caused by traders acting on private information

a semi nonparametric approach to the demand for uk monetary assets we estimate an asymptotically ideal model of the demand for uk personal sector monetary assets we use data that are consistent with utility maximizing behaviour and find that uk monetary assets are generally substitutes in use the estimated elasticities of substitution during the 1980s and the early 1990s indicate that a relatively broad monetary aggregate should be used in economic studies the results also suggest that any policy based on interest or user cost elasticities of substitution between financial assets should be based on the morishima elasticities as the allen uzawa calculation can give misleading results

risky monetary aggregates for the uk and us abstract we extend the scope of monetary aggregation beyond capital certain assets that make up central bank data sets and identify groups of assets that form monetary aggregates composed of both capital certain and risky capital uncertain assets we construct monetary aggregates for the us and uk using a superlative index and relax a key assumption of the consumption capital asset pricing model ccapm a one year planning horizon by using forecasted returns on risky assets our new risky monetary aggregates perform well in var tests we recommended exploring risky assets as providers of liquidity services in future research on this topic

monetary aggregation and the neutrality of money zisimos koustas this article tests the long run neutrality of money proposition using quarterly u s data over the period from 1960 1 to 1996 2 and the methodology suggested by king and watson 1997 paying particular attention to the integration and cointegration properties of the variables comparisons are made among simple sum divisia and currency equivalent ce monetary aggregates using the anderson et al 1997a 1997b series of divisia and ce monetary aggregates jel e40 e50 c32 i introduction the aim of this article is to investigate a long run question about the role of money in monetary policy whether changes in the conduct of monetary policy influence the growth rate of output as lucas 1996 p 661 puts it so much thought has been devoted to this question and so much evidence is available that one might reasonably assume that it had been solved long ago but this is not the case in fact recently fisher and seater 1993 and king and watson 1997 contribute to the literature on testing quantity theoretic propositions by developing tests using recent advances in the theory of nonstationary regressors and show that meaningful long run neutrality and superneutrality tests can only be constructed if both nominal and real variables satisfy certain nonstationarity conditions and that much of the older literature violates these requirements in this paper in the spirit of serletis and koustas 1998 and koustas and serletis 1999 we test the long run neutrality and superneutrality of money using the king and watson 1997 methodology paying particular attention to the gains that can be achieved by rigorous use of microeconomic and aggregation theoretic foundations in the construction of money measures this is accomplished by making comparisons among simple sum divisia and currency equivalent ce monetary aggregates using the anderson et al 1997a 1997b data see anderson et al 1997a 1997b for more details we also pay attention to the integration and cointegration properties of the variables because meaningful neutrality and superneutrality tests critically depend on such properties the organization of the article is as follows the next section briefly discusses the problem of the definition aggregation of money in section iii we investigate the univariate time series properties of the variables as these properties are relevant for some problems of potential importance in the practical conduct of monetary policy as well as for estimation and hypothesis testing in section iv we test the long run neutrality and superneutrality of money propositions using the king and watson 1997 structural bivariate autoregressive methodology paying particular attention to the integration and cointegration properties of the data the final section concludes ii the many kinds of money the monetary aggregates currently in use by the federal reserve are simple sum indices in which all monetary components are assigned a constant and equal unitary weight this index is m in 1 m sigma sup n sub i 1 x sub i where x sub i is one of the n monetary components of the monetary aggregate m this summation index implies that all monetary components contribute equally to the money total and it views all components as dollar for dollar perfect substitutes there is no question that such an index represents an index of the stock of nominal monetary wealth but cannot in general represent a valid structural economic variable for the services of the quantity of money over the years there has been a steady stream of attempts at properly weighting monetary components within a simple sum aggregate with no theory however any weighting scheme is questionable barnett 1980 derived the theoretical linkage between monetary theory and aggregation and index number theory he applied economic aggregation and index number theory and constructed monetary aggregates based on diewert s 1976 class of superlative quantity index numbers

monopoly with incomplete information recent theoretical research on principal agent relationships has emphasized incentive problems that arise when the parties involved are constrained by either asymmetric information or their inability to monitor each other s actions here we concentrate on the former constraint and consider the case of a single principal the monopolist the main contribution is to show that under a separability assumption strong conclusions can be drawn about the nature of optimal incentive schemes although the primary focus is on optimal quantity discounts in a monopolized market the results also shed light on related topics such as optimal income taxation and commodity bundling

price clustering of chinese ipos the impact of regulation cultural factors and negotiation abstractduring june 2009 may 2012 the china securities regulatory commission csrc suspended window guidance that limits issue prices using this regime change as a natural experiment we test th

the substitutability of equities and consumer durable goods a portfolio choice approach the stock market crash of october 1987 led many economists to lower their forecast of gnp growth for 1988 the rationale was that the loss of wealth that resulted from the crash would force asset holders to reduce their consumption expenditures yet a major slowdown in economic growth was not realized in the months following the crash gamer 11 explains this fact in terms of the life cycle hypothesis of consumption he argues that the potential adverse effect of stock market losses on planned consumption would be spread out over the entire lifetime of asset holders so that the immediate effect of the crash on the level

bounding an economic monetary aggregate under nonhomothetic preferences we construct nonparametric bounds on true quantity indexes for the realistic case of nonhomothetic preferences these bounds do not require assumptions about the form of the underlying aggregator function we construct these bounds using monetary assets that meet necessary conditions for the existence of an aggregate we find that a tornqvist index of these monetary assets falls within the nonparametric bounds on true quantity indexes almost all of the time whereas a simple sum of these monetary assets falls outside these bounds more than one third of the time

is the effect of competition on price dispersion nonmonotonic evidence from the u s airline industry we investigate the effect of competition on price dispersion in the airline industry using panel data from 1993 to 2008 we find a nonmonotonic effect of competition on price dispersion an increase in competition is associated with greater price dispersion in concentrated markets but with less price dispersion in competitive markets an inverse u relationship our empirical findings are consistent with an oligopolistic second degree price discrimination model and encompass contradictory findings in the literature

competition and collusion in dealer markets this article develops a game theoretic model to analyze market makers intertemporal pricing strategies we show that dealers who adopt noncooperative pricing strategies may set bid ask spreads above competitive levels this form of implicit collusion differs from explicit collusion where dealers cooperate to fix prices price discreteness or asymmetric information are not required for collusion to occur rather institutional arrangements that restrict access to the order flow are important determinants of the ability to collude because they reduce dealers incentives to compete on price public policy efforts to increase interdealer competition should focus on such restrictions

nonparametric demand analysis of u k personal sector decisions on consumption leisure and monetary assets a reappraisal this paper utilizes a new data set to test for utility maximizing behavior and weakly separable subutility functions in the context of a utility function comprising durables nondurables services leisure and monetary asset holdings for the u k personal sector all the data sets analyzed demonstrated consistency with respect to utility maximizing behavior the weak separability results prove to be relatively invariant to the degree of aggregation over goods but highly sensitive to the assump tion made regarding the representative consumer per household scaling of the data produced a utility function that is weakly separable in goods services and leisure and in monetary assets

nonlinear pricing with random participation the canonical selection contracting programme takes the agent s participation decision as deterministic and finds the optimal contract typically satisfying this constraint for the worst type upon weakening this assumption of known reservation values by introducing independent randomness into the agents outside options we find that some of the received wisdom from mechanism design and nonlinear pricing is not robust and the richer model which allows for stochastic participation affords a more general empirical specification we develop a multidimensional methodology for addressing this class of problems providing two important applications to nonlinear pricing first with nonlinear pricing by a monopolist the familiar nodistortion at the top result persists but in tandem with the surprising conclusion that there is either no distortion at the bottom or bunching second in a simple model of product differentiated duopolists competing with nonlinear pricing we show that generally the duopoly outcome is qualitatively similar to the monopoly outcome however when marginal costs are symmetric and competition is sufficiently intense distortions disappear and the equilibrium outcome takes a remarkably simple form efficient quality allocations with cost plus fee pricing

nonlinear pricing and competition intensity in a hotelling type model with discrete product and consumer types abstract this paper develops a hotelling model with discrete product and consumer types we analyze the impact of horizontal differentiation competition intensity on relative prices we find that the optimal price ratio of high to low quality products decreases with less competition

clustering in crude oil prices and the target pricing zone hypothesis abstract this paper studies the target pricing zone tpz hypothesis for crude oil by examining price clustering in the dollar digit it is hypothesized that price clustering occurs within an established tpz if opec is able to defend the upper and lower bounds through output changes the results show that prices strongly cluster around the dollar digit value of 9 within the tpz sub periods but not outside the sub periods furthermore the degree of clustering declines when production capacity utilization is high and when production significantly exceeds quotas consistent with opec s inability to defend the zone nine centered clustering also results in lower contemporaneous and next day volatility these results support the target pricing zone hypothesis of crude oil

why nasdaq market makers avoid odd eighth quotes recent studies argue that implicit collusion explains the tendency of nasdaq market makers to avoid odd eighth price quotes this paper focuses on the role that preference trading plays in determining quoted spreads under the postulated effects of preference trading an analysis of the relation between spreads and price fractions explains the paucity of odd eighth quotes on nasdaq empirical results from a comprehensive data set show that exogenous economic characteristics explain the distribution of price fractions across securities and illustrate the stability of that distribution over time these results contradict empirical results offered as support for the collusion hypothesis

do investors prefer round stock prices evidence from israeli ipo auctions abstract we find round number clustering in orders submitted by investors in israeli ipo auctions explanations offered for price clustering such as dealer collusion or implicit agreement to simplify negotiations cannot explain price clustering in this market therefore this is direct evidence that investors prefer round numbers

do liquidity measures measure liquidity abstract given the key role of liquidity in finance research identifying high quality proxies based on daily as opposed to intraday data would permit liquidity to be studied over relatively long timeframes and across many countries using new measures and widely employed measures in the literature we run horseraces of annual and monthly estimates of each measure against liquidity benchmarks our benchmarks are effective spread realized spread and price impact based on both trade and quote taq and rule 605 data we find that the new effective realized spread measures win the majority of horseraces while the amihud 2002 illiquidity and stock returns cross section and time series effects journal of financial markets 5 31 56 measure does well measuring price impact

clustered pricing in the corporate loan market theory and empirical evidence abstract existing theories explaining security price clustering as well as clustering in the retail deposit and mortgage markets are incompatible with the clustering in the corporate loan market we develop a new theoretical model that the attitude of the lender toward the uncertainty about the quality of the borrower leads to the clustering of spreads our empirical results support our theoretical model and we find that clustering increases with the degree of uncertainty between the lender and the borrower in contrast clustering is less likely when the uncertainty about the quality of the borrower has been reduced through repeated access and through prior interactions of the lender and the borrower

penny pricing and the components of spread and depth changes abstract recent studies show that decimal pricing led to significant reductions in the spread and depth on the nyse in this paper we examine how the observed changes in the spread and depth can be attributed to different factors we show that stocks with higher proportions of one tick spreads and odd sixteenth quotes and more frequent trading before decimalization experienced larger declines in the spread and depth afterwards we interpret this result as evidence of reduced binding constraints and increased price competition under decimal pricing we also find that decimal pricing led to nontrivial changes in select stock attributes and that these changes exerted an additional impact on spreads and depths our results suggest that sub penny pricing may further reduce the spreads of high volume low risk or low price stocks

why markets should not necessarily reduce the tick size abstract this paper studies the consequences of a tick size change on the paris bourse thus providing a natural experiment on an order driven market the change raised the tick size for some stocks and lowered it for other in contrast with us exchanges results this generated neither a reduction in liquidity provision for large trades nor a change in the spread based on this paper and on us results it appears an increasing but convex relationship between the relative tick size and the relative spread thus it implies that a new pricing grid does not necessarily lead to change execution costs but it changes the level of transparency in the liquidity supply

a psychological reexamination of the bertrand paradox the bertrand paradox describes a situation in which two competing firms reach an outcome where both price at marginal cost in laboratory experiments this equilibrium is not generally observed existing empirical works on bertrand competition have found evidence for boundedly rational models we find that such models are useful in organizing behavior in early stages of the game but less so in later stages we show that a new model coarse grid nash equilibrium based on the assumption that subjects discretize the strategy space explains the data better

tick size bid ask spreads and market structure we propose a link between market structure and the resulting market characteristics tick size bid ask spreads quote clustering and market depth we analyze transactions data of stocks traded on the london stock exchange a dealer market we conclude that market charateristics are endogenous to the market structure the london dealer market does not have a mandated tick size and it exhibits higher spreads higher quote clusterings and higher market depth than the nyse auction market clustering of trade prices is similar in london and new york

auctions vs bookbuilding and the control of underpricing in hot ipo markets market returns before the offer price is set affect the amount and variability of initial public offering ipo underpricing thus an important question is what ipo procedure is best adapted for controlling underpricing in hot versus cold market conditions the french stock market offers a unique arena for empirical research on this topic since three substantially different issuing mechanisms auctions bookbuilding and fixed price are used there using 1992 1998 data we find that the auction mechanism is associated with less underpricing and lower variance of underpricing we show that the auction procedure s ability to incorporate more information from recent market conditions into the ipo price is an important reason copyright 2003 oxford university press

implications of the discreteness of observed stock prices stock prices on the organized exchanges are restricted to be divisible by 1 8 therefore the true price usually differs from the observed price this paper examines the biases resulting from the discreteness of observed stock prices it is shown that the natural estimators of the variance and all of the higher order moments of the rate of returns are biased an approximate set of correction factors is derived and a procedure is outlined to show how the correction can be made the natural estimators of the beta and of the variance of the market portfolio on the other hand are nearly unbiased the behavior of stock prices has been an issue of interest to the financial economist for many years this interest resulted in a growing number of empirical studies which attempt to estimate this behavior e g blattberg and gonedes 2 fama 6 fama and roll 7 8 barnea and downes 1 to date stock price behavior is estimated under the assumption that the observed trading price is the true equilibrium price however observed stock prices and stock price changes on the organized exchanges are restricted to multiples of 1 8 of a dollar 1 therefore if the true distribution of stock prices is continuous an observed trading price can be different from the true price this paper examines the biases in estimating the moments of stock price changes caused by the discreteness of observed stock prices the major focus of the paper is in noting this problem providing a model which explains the source of these biases and quantifying their size section i demonstrates that due to the discrete nature of observed stock prices the natural estimators for the variance and for the higher order moments of the rate of returns are biased upward this bias is larger for stocks with lower prices and smaller standard deviation for instance assuming that the standard deviation a is 0 001 the stock price is one dollar the true probability distribution of stock prices is lognormal and the observed prices are as close as possible to the true prices then the natural estimator of r has expectation 0 01400 hence it is biased upward by 1300 significant biases have important implications in option pricing we derive an approximate set of correction factors which can be applied to the

why don t issuers get upset about leaving money on the table in ipos one of the puzzles regarding initial public offerings ipos is that issuers rarely get upset about leaving substantial amounts of money on the table defined as the number of shares sold times the difference between the first day closing market price and the offer price the average ipo leaves 9 1 million on the table this number is approximately twice as large as the fees paid to investment bankers and represents a substantial indirect cost to the issuing firm we present a prospect theory model that focuses on the covariance of the money left on the table and wealth changes our reasoning also provides an explanation for a second puzzling pattern much more money is left on the table following recent market rises than after market falls this results in an explanation of hot issue markets we also offer a new explanation for why ipos are underpriced copyright 2002 oxford university press

homothetic efficiency theory and applications we provide a nonparametric revealed preference approach to demand analysis based on homothetic efficiency homotheticity is widely assumed often implicitly because it is a convenient and often useful restriction however this assumption is rarely tested and data rarely satisfy testable conditions to overcome this we provide a way to estimate homothetic efficiency of consumption choices the method provides considerably higher discriminatory power against random behavior than the commonly used afriat efficiency we use experimental and household survey data to illustrate how our approach is useful for different empirical applications and can provide greater predictive success

symposium on market microstructure focus on nasdaq abstract this special issue of the journal of financial economics includes six articles that analyze the market microstructure of nasdaq in various ways the question of the costs of trading on nasdaq has become contentious in both the academic and legal regulatory arenas since the christie and schultz 1994 article first noted that many actively traded nasdaq stocks were almost never quoted on odd eights the articles in this symposium bring new and interesting insights to this debate

what makes carbon traders cluster their orders abstract the ability to trade large amounts of assets at low costs could be hindered when the size of the orders is concentrated at specific trade sizes this paper documents evidence of size clustering behavior in the european carbon futures market and analyzes the circumstances under which it happens our findings show that carbon trades are concentrated in sizes of one to five contracts and in multiples of five we have also demonstrated that more clustered prices have more clustered sizes suggesting that price and size resolution in the european carbon market are complementary and that carbon traders round both the price and the size of their orders finally the analysis of the key determinants of the size clustering reveals that traders use a reduced number of different trade sizes when uncertainty is high market liquidity is poor and the desire to open new positions and cancel old ones is very strong

nonparametric tests of utility maximization and weak separability for consumption leisure and money some of the most fundamental assumptions of economics are utility maximization and weak separability of the arguments in the represen tative consumer s utility function this paper contains results from nonparametric tests of these assumptions about consumer behavior the authors find that quarterly per capita data on consumption goods le isure and monetary assets are consistent with utility maximization further consumption goods and leisure meet necessary and sufficient conditions for weak separability additionally one grouping of relat ively liquid monetary assets meets the necessary conditions for weak separability they also test and find no evidence of homothetic prefe rences copyright 1987 by mit press

an analysis of intraday patterns in price clustering on the tokyo stock exchange abstract stock prices tend to cluster at round numbers a phenomenon observed in many markets using tick by tick transaction data this article studies price clustering on the tokyo stock exchange which is a computerized limit order market as for the intraday pattern the degree of price clustering is greatest at the market opening then it decreases during the first half hour and reaches a stable level it does not increase again near the market closing there is no clear difference in clustering between call auctions and continuous auctions

the translog utility function and the demand for money in the united states in recent years considerable effort has been directed towards establishing the nature of the relationship between money and nearmonies but with mixed success the approaches vary from multi interest rate single equation studies to the careful simultaneous equations studies summarized and amended by feige and pearce 1977 and extended recently by donovan 1978 offenbacher 1979 and barnett 1980 the empirical results also vary with numerous studies favoring only one interest rate see the surveys in fisher 1978 1983 some claiming that a variety of entities are close substitutes for money e g chetty 1969 and others showing that weak substitution or even complementarity may be the result of the measurement of elasticities of substitution between money and a number of other assets e g feige and pearce 1977 offenbacher 1979 and barnett 1980 the debate seems to have overshadowed a second and equally intriguing issue which centers on the establishment of an acceptable definition of money the basic idea of this study is to take an approach that takes account of the different degrees of moneyness possessed by the various monetary assets this paper produces quantitative estimates of the degree of substitutability of other monetary assets for money in the context of a flexible functional form model with a

the composition and construction of monetary aggregates an economic monetary aggregate is composed from a set of monetary goods that are at least weakly separable from other goods in the optimizing agent s utility function we construct such an aggregate using a divisia index number we demonstrate that through the middle of the 1980s forecasts of the inflation rate based on our economic monetary aggregate are superior to forecasts based on the simple sum monetary aggregates m1 or m2

what s not there odd lots and market data we investigate odd lot trades in equity markets odd lots are increasingly used in algorithmic and high frequency trading but are not reported to the consolidated tape or in databases such as taq in our sample the median number of odd lot trades is 24 but in some stocks odd lots are 60 or more of trading odd lot trades contribute 35 of price discovery consistent with informed traders using odd lots to avoid detection omitting odd lot trades leads to inaccuracies in order imbalance measures and makes sentiment measures unreliable excluding odd lots from the consolidated tape raises important regulatory issues

an analysis of trade size clustering and its relation to stealth trading abstract nyse and nasdaq trades increasingly cluster on multiples of 500 1 000 and 5 000 shares such clustering varies over time and across stocks and tends to increase with the level of trading activity furthermore rounded trades tend to have more persistence both in occurrence and in trade initiation finally medium sized rounded trades tend to have greater relative price impact than large rounded trades from these observations we surmise that trade size clustering is consistent at least in part with the actions of stealth traders who tend to use medium sized rounded transactions in an attempt to disguise their trades

bank deposit rate clustering theory and empirical evidence the market prices of stocks and other assets tend to cluster on round fractions a similar clustering is found in the interest rates paid on retail bank deposits however the theoretical rationales given for asset price clustering are incompatible with the clustering of retail deposit rates this paper proposes a theory based on depositors limited recall it shows that when banks exploit this phenomenon deposit rates will tend to be set at round fractions and will be relatively sticky at these levels the implications of this theoretical model are tested using money market deposit account and retail certificate of deposit interest rate data from a sample of more than 500 banks