Essays on Arbitrage and Market Liquidity

Dissertation o. Habilitation

The first essay investigates how credit risk, the risk that a bond issuer will default, affects bond market liquidity. Specifically, we depart from the current literature in that we analyze the direct and indirect channels through which credit risk affects market liquidity, rather than determining whether both are priced in the bond. We focus on the Italian sovereign bond market, which allows us to determine how central bank interventions affect the sensitivity of the liquidity provision by market makers to default risk. We motivate our empirical analysis with a simple model of a risk averse market maker, holding an inventory of a risky asset and setting her optimal marginal quotes (and, therefore, the optimal bid-ask spread), in the presence of margin constraints and borrowing costs. The margins, set by a clearing house, depend on the risk of the asset, as measured by the CDS spread, and the actions of the central bank. The CDS market is fundamental to the market maker’s and the clearing house’s decisions, since it is from the CDS market that they deduce the future volatility of the asset return. In addition, the market maker can pledge her assets at the central bank to finance her positions at rates influenced by the central bank’s actions. The model provides several empirical predictions that we test in the empirical section of the paper.

Object Details

• ISBN: 9788793579170
• Language: Englisch

References and Relationships

• Bibliographic citation: Series: PhD Series ; No. 22.2017

Classification and Topics

• Classification: Management

Contributors, Places and Time

• Event: Geistige Schöpfung
• (who): Tomio, Davide
• Event: Veröffentlichung
• (who): Copenhagen Business School (CBS)
• (where): Frederiksberg
• (when): 2017

Further information

• Handle: http://hdl.handle.net/10419/209030
• Last update: 10.03.2025, 11:44 AM CET