Market Makers' Supply and Pricing of Financial Market LiquidityPu Shen and Ross M. Starr University of California at San Diego, Economics Working Paper Series from Department of Economics, UC San Diego Abstract: This study models the bid-ask spread in financial markets as a function of asset price variability and order flow. The market-maker is characterized as passively accepting orders to buy and to sell a security at the market's prevailing price (plus or minus half the bid-ask spread). The bid-ask spread adjusts to cover market-makers' average costs. The bid-ask spread then varies positively with: the security's price volatility, the volatility of order flow, and the absolute value of the market-maker's net inventory position. Each of these variables increases average cost and hence is priced in the bid-ask spread. Thus market liquidity (varying inversely with the bid-ask spread) declines with increasing price and volume volatility and with increasing size of market-maker net inventory positions. The model hence provides a particularly simple explanation for declining market liquidity during periods of large price movements and trading imbalances that increase the size of market-makers' net inventory. Keywords: bid-ask; spread (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cdl:ucsdec:qt69f9h5bz Access Statistics for this paper More papers in University of California at San Diego, Economics Working Paper Series from Department of Economics, UC San Diego Contact information at EDIRC. |
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