Three Essays On Fairness Liquidity And Efficiency In Modern Financial Markets PDF Download

This dissertation research comprises three essays. In the first essay, we study the impact of high-frequency trading on market fairness and efficiency. The implementation of the Arrowhead Renewal on the Tokyo Stock Exchange (TSE) in 2015 reduced latency from 1 millisecond to less than 0.5 milliseconds and led to an increase in high-frequency tradingas proxied by the cancel-to-trade ratioof 34%, We find that the number of incidents of marking-the-close declined by 17%, indicating that market fairness improves. We find that for high-tick-size and high-market-capitalization stocks market efficiency improves, but for low-tick-size and low-market-capitalization stocks, it does not. In the second essay, we test the implications of competing theories on liquidity dynamics during extreme price movements (EPMs). Our findings indicate that market makers strategically allow for price pressures and earn compensation from pricing errors. As a result, liquidity provision intensifies towards the end of an average EPM. This goes counter to a widespread concern that market-making constraints cause the deterioration of liquidity as EPMs develop. Finally, we demonstrate that limit order book dynamics during EPMs are in line with a socially beneficial equilibrium. In the third essay, we revisit the tax-loss selling hypothesis as a potential explanation of the well-known January effect in securities markets. We expand the empirical evidence from municipal bond closed-end funds by extending the sample period by almost 20 years and adding exchange-traded funds to the sample. Our updated sample covers the recent growth of municipal bond ETFs and a significant increase in municipal bond trading volume and liquidity. Both developments reduce arbitrage costs and thus are expected to increase tax-loss selling in the funds and increase the transmission of price effects to the underlying bonds. We find that the January effect of municipal bond closed-end funds becomes stronger in more recent years, and show evidence that largely supports the tax-loss hypothesis. We also find some evidence indicating a smaller discrepancy between the abnormal returns of the funds and underlying bonds..