http://repub.eur.nl/res/aut/2910/ List of Publications en http://repub.eur.nl/static-eur/img/logo.png http://repub.eur.nl http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/37780/ 2012-08-01T00:00:00Z Macro announcements change the equilibrium risk-free rate. We find that Treasury prices reflect part of the impact instantaneously, but intermediaries rely on their customer order flow after the announcement to discover the full impact. This customer flow informativeness is strongest when analyst macro forecasts are most dispersed. The result holds for 30-year Treasury futures trading in both electronic and open-outcry markets. We further show that intermediaries benefit from privately recognizing informed customer flow, as their own-account trading profitability correlates with customer order access. © Copyright http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/16300/ 2009-05-01T00:00:00Z We develop a new likelihood-based approach to sign trades in the absence of quotes. It is equally efficient as existing MCMC methods, but more than 10 times faster. It can deal with the occurrence of multiple trades at the same time, and noisily observed trade times. We apply this method to a high-frequency dataset of the 30Y U.S. treasury futures to investigate the role of the market maker. Most theory characterizes him as an uninformed passive liquidity supplier. Our results suggest that some market makers actively demand liquidity for a substantial part of the day and are informed speculators. http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/6866/ 2001-06-19T00:00:00Z A number of recent theoretical studies have explored trading in fragmented markets, e.g. Biais et al. (2000), a phenomenon increasingly witnessed in modern markets. The key assumption generating the results is that there is at least one liquidity demander exploiting access to all markets by optimally splitting orders across markets. This paper seeks to test this assumnption in a natural experiment involving Dutch stocks that are traded both in Amsterdam and New York. The results confirm the presence of rational, order splitting traders. This explains the increased volume and relatively large and persistent price changes for the overlapping period. http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/15878/ 2001-04-01T00:00:00Z A recent literature analyzing the dynamics of firms and industries suggests that the contribution of new and small firms to the dynamics of competition is significantly greater than found in a static analysis. Policy makers have responded by implementing a wide range of programs to reduce barriers to new-firm startup. At the same time, a number of European countries have maintained systems of collective agreements imposing industry-wide standards on the deployment and remuneration of inputs, particularly labor. The purpose of this paper is to examine whether the ability to deviate from the industry standards practiced by the incumbent firms promotes the viability of small and new firms. We examine this using a longitudinal data base from the Netherlands, where a system of rigid industry-wide collective agreements was abandoned in favor of greater flexibility. Whether or not the ability of small firms to deviate from the standards and practices of the incumbent firms in the industry promotes their viability in the Dutch context is instructive to other European countries, such as Germany and France. The latter countries have identified the startup of new firms as a central policy goal, but have maintained systems of industry-wide collective agreements. The important finding emerging from this paper is that wage flexibility promotes the viability of small firms and thus can be considered to be an instrument of competition policy in a dynamic context http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/7696/ 2000-03-17T00:00:00Z Market integration is studied for Dutch stocks cross-listed at the NYSE. Trading starts in Amsterdam and ends in New York with a one-hour overlap. Both markets are not perfectly integrated in that they can be viewed as one market with the well-documented U-shape in volatility, volume and spread. Increased values for the hour of overlap suggest informed trading. Zooming in on this hour, markets are integrated in that price discovery on both sides of the Atlantic reflects the same underlying, new information. Not consistent across all stocks is the origin of this information, Amsterdam, New York or both. http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/7726/ 1999-05-03T00:00:00Z In recent years the Value at Risk (VaR) concept for measuring downside risk has been widely studied. VaR basically is a summary statistic that quantifies the exposure of an asset or portfolio to market risk, or the risk that a position declines in value with adverse market price changes. Three parties have been particularly interested: financial institutions, regulators and corporates. In this paper, we focus on VaR use for corporates. This field is relatively unexplored. We show how VaR can be helpful to study market value risk -- proxied by share price risk. We develop a methodology to decompose the overall VaR into components that are attributable to underlying external risk factors and a residual idiosyncratic component. Apart from developing theoretical results, we study the airline industry to show what practical results our 'Component VaR framework' can yield. Like any multinational company, an airline faces significant exposures to external risk factors, e.g. commodity prices, interest rates and exchange rates. In our opinion, Component VaR analysis can enrich discussions in the company on financial risk management and shareholder value. http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/15887/ 1999-02-01T00:00:00Z http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/9719/ 1999-01-01T00:00:00Z The advent of a growing share of small firms in modern economies raises some intriguing questions. The most intriguing question undoubtedly is why so many smaller firms, which have traditionally been classified as sub-optimal scale firms, can exist. We suggest that, through pursuing a strategy of compensating factor differentials, that is by remunerating and deploying factors of production differently than their larger counterparts, small firms are able to compensate for size-inherent cost disadvantages. Using a sample of over seven thousand Dutch manufacturing firms, we find considerable evidence that such a strategy of compensating factor differentials is pursued within a European context. When viewed through a static lens, the existence of such a strategy, while making small and sub-optimal scale firms viable, suggests that they impose a net welfare loss on the economy. However, when viewed through a dynamic lens, the findings of a positive relationship between firm age and employee compensation as well as firm age and firm productivity suggest that there may be at least a tendency for the inefficient firm of today to become the efficient firm of tomorrow. 5 Are Small Firms Really Sub-Optimal? http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/7761/ 1998-04-20T00:00:00Z In this paper we introduce a new methodology to price American put options under stochastic interest rates. The method is a combination of an analytic approach and a binomial tree approach. We construct a binomial tree for the forward risk adjusted tree and calculate analytically the expected early exercise value in each point. For American puts with stochastic interest rates the correlation between the stock price process has different influences on the European option values and the early exercise premiums. This results in a nonmonotonic relation between this correlation and the American put option value. Furthermore, there is evidence that the early exercise premium due to stochastic interest rates is much larger than established before by other researchers. http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/2111/ 1997-12-01T00:00:00Z We analyze intraday volatility behavior for the Bund futures contract that is traded simultaneously at two competing exchanges. We investigate the transmission of volatility between the exchanges. We find that the lead/lag relations are restricted to a few minutes and do not reveal a dominant leader. We then analyze patterns in intraday volatility. We find that volatility behaves similarly at both exchanges; i.e., it decreases from the opening until early afternoon and increases thereafter. The same pattern is detected in explanatory variables such as traded volume and time-between-trades. http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/9696/ 1997-01-01T00:00:00Z Empirical analyses presented by Acs and Audretsch suggest differences in the market structure determinants of innovation between large and small firms in U.S. manufacturing. The evidence they offer is ambiguous. By using data for a different country (The Netherlands), a different measure of innovation and a different aggregation level, we offer new evidence, allowing a revaluation of the findings for the U.S. material. Moreover, the influence of the market structure determinants does not appear to differ between a period of sluggish growth (1983) and one of relatively high growth (1989). http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/9689/ 1996-01-01T00:00:00Z