Essays in financial economics
Keywords: Economics.

This dissertation explores effects of trading frictions due to the over-the-counter nature of some financial markets on asset prices, trading activity, market structure and efficiency. The first chapter analyses how the introduction of post-trade transparency affected dealers' trading and market liquidity in the secondary U.S. corporate bond market. Using the TRACE dataset with a novel variable identifying different dealers in the market, I quantify dealers' centrality in the context of the trading network and estimate a differential response to the reform across dealers of different centrality. I show that the introduction of transparency reduced the estimated bid-ask spreads of peripheral dealers by about 24 basis points, while spreads of core dealers remained unaffected. The trading volume of high-yield bonds fell by 6.7% for core dealers and by an insignificant amount for peripheral dealers. There was no effect on dealers' capital commitment and inventory behavior. To rationalize these findings, I propose a dynamic model of trade with asymmetric information and search frictions that gives rise to endogenous heterogeneity in dealers' trading activity and explains the empirical evidence. Three mechanisms through which transparency may affect the market are outlined: marketwise reduction in adverse selection, higher demand for immediacy by informed traders, and interaction between liquidity and informed traders. Further effects of transparency and welfare implications in the context of the model are discussed. The second chapter is co-authored with Diego Torres Patino. We study how short sale constraints on the lending side of the market affect asset prices in an equilibrium model with multiple assets. We endow investors with heterogeneous beliefs in order to generate short selling demand. We obtain a CAPM-like equation that links asset-specific excess returns with the market equity premium. In the presence of short sale constraints in the market, the model gives rise to asset-specific alphas that are explained by both asset-specific and market-wide short sale constraints; unconstrained stocks have higher risk-adjusted expected returns relative to the market portfolio, whereas the opposite holds for constrained stocks. In the absence of short sale constraints, the model reduces to the standard CAPM. We test the model using extensive data on short interest and borrow fees. The model is able to empirically explain asset prices for 10 portfolios sorted by the degree to which they are short sale constrained, as opposed to the CAPM and factor models which produce unexplained alphas that are significantly different from zero for the portfolios consisting of highly constrained stocks. In the final chapter, I study financial intermediation in a model of entry and competition between an over-the-counter market and exchange. The over-the-counter market is characterized by search, bargaining and capacity to intermediate trade of securities customized to individual investors. The exchange can support trading of a subset of standardized securities at prices quoted to all investors. I compute explicitly asset prices and volume at each trading venue and analyze efficiency of the resulting market structure. Bargaining power of investors in the OTC market and cost associated with trading non-customized securities at the exchange have ambiguous effects on the relative volume across the trading venues. The market outcome is inefficient due to bargaining in the OTC market and imperfect competition of specialist at the exchange. The model is well suited for quantitative analysis provided sufficiently detailed trading data from both types of trading venues.