Knowledge that Transforms

This paper documents coarse pricing by the U.S. Federal Reserve’s counterparty intermediaries in quantitative easing operations. Although the Fed explicitly sets a tick size of 1/256th in its reverse auctions to purchase Treasury securities, offer prices of primary dealers exhibit strong clustering on coarser grids. Top dealers price more finely, and coarse pricing is particularly prevalent when the security characteristics indicate greater difficulty in precise pricing. I argue that this coarse pricing results from information costs associated with increasing pricing precision. The results also point to a novel role of tick size in affecting dealer competition in central bank operations. • The Federal Reserve purchases U.S. Treasury securities through reverse auctions for quantitative easing(QE). • This paper documents coarse pricing by the New York Fed’s primary dealers (PDs) in these auctions. • PDs with larger market shares engage less in coarse pricing. • Cross-sectional analysis reveals that information costs of increasing price precision drive this dealer behavior. • Policy implications are discussed.

We study the trading activity of designated market makers (DMMs) in electronic markets using a unique dataset with audit-trail information on trader classification. DMMs may either adhere to their market-making agreements and offer immediacy during periods of heavy selling pressure, or they might lean-with-the-wind to profit from private information. We test these competing theories during extreme (downward) price movements, which we detect using a novel methodology. We show that DMMs provide liquidity when the selling pressure is concentrated on a single stock, but consume liquidity (leaving liquidity provision to slower traders) when several stocks are affected.