A Guide Tour Of The Market Microstructure Approach To Exchange Rate Determination

Historically, the fields of exchange-rate economics and microstructure finance have progressed independently of each other. Recent interaction, however, has given rise to a microstructure approach to exchange rates. This book focuses on the economics of financial information and how microstructure tools help to clarify the types of information most relevant to exchange rates. The microstructure approach views exchange rates from the perspective of the trading room, the place where exchange rates are actually determined. Emphasizing information economics over institutional issues, the approach departs from three unrealistic assumptions common to previous approaches: that all information relevant to exchange rates is publicly available, that all market participants are alike in their goals or in how they view information, and that how trading is organized is inconsequential for exchange rates. The book shows how exchange-rate behavior previously thought to be particularly puzzling can be explained using the microstructure approach. It contains a combination of theoretical and empirical work.

''In summary, the book is valuable as a textbook both at the advanced undergraduate level and at the graduate level. It is also very useful for the economist who wants to be brought up-to-date on theoretical and empirical research on exchange rate behaviour.'' ""Journal of International Economics""

Exchange rate economics is an important field of investigation for academics, professionals and policy-makers. This book provides a comprehensive survey of the theory of and empirical evidence on the determination and effects of exchange rates. The exposition utilizes both diagrammatic and mathematical representations of the underlying models. The book is a comprehensive reference for those engaged in this field of research.

Motivated by the observation that exchange-rate management resembles market making, we use microstructure theory in order to conduct a welfare analysis of exchange-rate management, including the quot;corner solutionsquot; of a free float and a fixed peg. We show that a policy that smoothes out exchange-rate fluctuations needs to trade off the welfare gain due to lower risk exposure of local producers against the trading losses that the policy would generate owing to speculation. We identify the conditions under which exchange-rate management can increase welfare and argue that these conditions are more likely to be satisfied in illiquid markets, mainly small economies and emerging markets. We also explore the role of a Tobin tax (assuming enforceability) in facilitating exchange-rate management.

In comparison to macroeconomic models of nominal exchange rates, the market microstructure approach performs better in explaining exchange rate changes over short time horizons. The microstructure approach implies that information in order flow drives the dynamic processes of price evolution. This paper studies the informativeness of order flow under different market conditions in the foreign exchange market. We find that order flow tends to be more informative when the market experiences large bid-ask spreads, high volatility or low trading volumes. We also identify nonlinearities in the relationship between order flow and foreign exchange rate changes and find that these nonlinearities can be captured by the Interaction model and the Logistic Smooth Transition Regression (LSTR) model.

This book exposes and comments on the consequences of Reg NMS and MiFID on market microstructure. It covers changes in market design, electronic trading, and investor and trader behaviors. The emergence of high frequency trading and critical events like the'Flash Crash' of 2010 are also analyzed in depth.Using a quantitative viewpoint, this book explains how an attrition of liquidity and regulatory changes can impact the whole microstructure of financial markets. A mathematical Appendix details the quantitative tools and indicators used through the book, allowing the reader to go further independently.This book is written by practitioners and theoretical experts and covers practical aspects (like the optimal infrastructure needed to trade electronically in modern markets) and abstract analyses (like the use on entropy measurements to understand the progress of market fragmentation).As market microstructure is a recent academic field, students will benefit from the book's overview of the current state of microstructure and will use the Appendix to understand important methodologies. Policy makers and regulators will use this book to access theoretical analyses on real cases. For readers who are practitioners, this book delivers data analysis and basic processes like the designs of Smart Order Routing and trade scheduling algorithms.In this second edition, the authors have added a large section on orderbook dynamics, showing how liquidity can predict future price moves, and how High Frequency Traders can profit from it. The section on market impact has also been updated to show how buying or selling pressure moves prices not only for a few hours, but even for days, and how prices relax (or not) after a period of intense pressure.Further, this edition includes pages on Dark Pools, Circuit Breakers and added information outside of Equity Trading, because MiFID 2 is likely to push fixed income markets towards more electronification. The authors explore what is to be expected from this change in microstructure. The appendix has also been augmented to include the propagator models (for intraday price impact), a simple version of Kyle's model (1985) for daily market impact, and a more sophisticated optimal trading framework, to support the design of trading algorithms.