Various markets, particularly NASDAQ, have been under pressure from regulators and market participants to introduce call auctions for their opening and closing periods. We investigate the performance of call markets at the open and close from a unique natural experiment provided by the institutional structure of the London Stock Exchange. As well as a call auction, there is a parallel ¶off-exchange¶ dealership system at both the market's open and close. Although the call market dominates the dealership system in terms of price discovery, we find that the call suffers from a high failure rate to open and close trading, especially on days characterized by difficult trading conditions. In particular, the call's trading costs increase significantly when (a) asymmetric information is high, (b) trading is expected to be slow, (c) order flow is unbalanced, and (d) uncertainty is high. Furthermore, traders' resort to call auctions is negatively correlated with firm size, implying that the call auction is not the optimal method for opening and closing trading of medium and small sized stocks. We suggest that these results can be explained by thick market externalities.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to look for a different version under "Related research" (further below) or search for a different version of it.
Publisher Info
Paper provided by Financial Markets Group in its series FMG Discussion Papers with number
dp506.
Cited by: (explanations, Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.)