We show whether central clearing of a particular class of derivatives lowers counterparty risk. For plausible cases, adding a central clearing counterparty (CCP) for a class of derivatives such as credit default swaps reduces netting efficiency, leading to an increase in average exposure to counterparty default. Further, clearing different classes of derivatives in separate CCPs always increases counterparty exposures relative to clearing the combined set of derivatives in a single CCP. We provide theory as well as illustrative numerical examples of these results that are calibrated to notional derivatives position data for major banks.

Dark pools are equity trading systems that do not publicly display orders. Dark pools offer potential price improvements but do not guarantee execution. Informed traders tend to trade in the same direction, crowd on the heavy side of the market, and face a higher execution risk in the dark pool, relative to uninformed traders. Consequently, exchanges are more attractive to informed traders, and dark pools are more attractive to uninformed traders. Under certain conditions, adding a dark pool alongside an exchange concentrates price-relevant information into the exchange and improves price discovery. Improved price discovery coincides with reduced exchange liquidity.

Dark pools are equity trading systems that do not publicly display orders. Dark pools offer potential price improvements but do not guarantee execution. Informed traders tend to trade in the same direction, crowd on the heavy side of the market, and face a higher execution risk in the dark pool, relative to uninformed traders. Consequently, exchanges are more attractive to informed traders, and dark pools are more attractive to uninformed traders. Under certain conditions, adding a dark pool alongside an exchange concentrates price-relevant information into the exchange and improves price discovery. Improved price discovery coincides with reduced exchange liquidity.

[This article offers a dynamic model of opaque over-the-counter markets. A seller searches for an attractive price by visiting multiple buyers, one at a time. The buyers do not observe contacts, quotes, or trades elsewhere in the market. A repeat contact with a buyer reveals the seller's reduced outside options and worsens the price offered by the revisited buyer. When the asset value is uncertain and common to all buyers, a visit by the seller suggests that other buyers could have quoted unattractive prices and thus worsens the visited buyer's inference regarding the asset value.]

This paper offers a fully rational, dynamic model of opaque over-the-counter markets. An investor searches for an attractive price by visiting multiple dealers in any chosen sequence, including repeat contacts. The dealers do not observe negotiations elsewhere in the market, including the order of contacts. Under stated conditions, a repeat contact with a dealer reveals the investor's reduced outside options and worsens the price quote. When the fundamental value of an asset is uncertain, market opacity and uncertain contact order could exacerbate adverse selection and lead to inefficient market breakdown.

This article studies the impact of increasing trading frequency in financial markets on allocative efficiency. We build and solve a dynamic model of sequential double auctions in which traders trade strategically with demand schedules. Trading needs are generated by time-varying private information about the asset value and private values for owning the asset, as well as quadratic inventory costs. We characterize a linear equilibrium with stationary strategies and its efficiency properties in closed form. Frequent trading (more double auctions per unit of time) allows more immediate asset reallocation after new information arrives, at the cost of a lower volume of beneficial trades in each double auction. Under stated conditions, the trading frequency that maximizes allocative efficiency coincides with the information arrival frequency for scheduled information releases, but can far exceed the information arrival frequency if new information arrives stochastically. A simple calibration of the model suggests that a moderate market slowdown to the level of seconds or minutes per double auction can improve allocative efficiency for assets with relatively narrow investor participation and relatively infrequent news, such as small- and micro-cap stocks.

Size-discovery mechanisms allow large quantities of an asset to be exchanged at a price that does not respond to price pressure. Primary examples include "workup" in Treasury markets, "matching sessions" in corporate bond and CDS markets, and block-trading "dark pools" in equity markets. By freezing the execution price and giving up on market-clearing, size-discovery mechanisms overcome concerns by large investors over their price impacts. Price-discovery mechanisms clear the market, but cause investors to internalize their price impacts, inducing costly delays in the reduction of position imbalances. We show how augmenting a price-discovery mechanism with a size-discovery mechanism improves allocative efficiency.

We propose and test a theory of using commodities as collateral for financing. Under capital control and collateral constraint, investors import commodities and pledge them as collateral to earn higher expected returns. Higher collateral demands increase commodity prices and make the inventory-convenience yield relation less negative. Our model illustrates these equilibrium effects and suggests that the violation of covered interest-rate parity is a proxy for collateral demands. Evidence from eight commodities in China and developed markets supports the theoretical predictions. Our findings complement the theory of storage and provide new insights into the financialization of commodity markets.

Abstract We propose a regime-switching present-value model with latent variables to jointly investigate the predictability of stock returns and dividend growth. We find that both return predictability and dividend growth predictability are time-varying. Interestingly, the predictability of stock returns and dividend growth is a tug-of-war contest: when dividend growth is highly predictable in the high-volatility regime, stock returns are largely unpredictable; in contrast, when dividend growth is less predictable in the low-volatility regime, stock returns are significantly predictable. We also investigate macroeconomic determinants of regime switches and find that two regimes are intimately related to macroeconomic risk and economic activity.

Abstract The evidence from the repo market is more supportive to the expectations hypothesis, but term structure anomalies still remain. Using the Bekaert–Hodrick–Marshall (2001) method, we investigate whether term structure anomalies can be explained by peso problems by estimating a regime-switching model for the overnight repo rate. We find that term structure anomalies can largely be accounted for by peso problems, probably along with a small time-varying risk premium for the full sample. However, peso problem explanations cannot resolve term structure anomalies for the postcrisis sample. In addition, we find that three regimes are related to calendar effects in the repo market.