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Opening and closing the market: evidence from the London Stock Exchange

Ellul, Andrew, Shin, Hyun Song and Tonks, Ian (2004) Opening and closing the market: evidence from the London Stock Exchange. Financial Markets Group Discussion Papers (506). Financial Markets Group, The London School of Economics and Political Science, London, UK.

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Abstract

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.

Item Type: Monograph (Discussion Paper)
Official URL: http://fmg.ac.uk
Additional Information: © 2004 The Authors
Divisions: Financial Markets Group
Subjects: H Social Sciences > HG Finance
H Social Sciences > HB Economic Theory
JEL classification: G - Financial Economics > G1 - General Financial Markets
G - Financial Economics > G2 - Financial Institutions and Services
Date Deposited: 06 Aug 2009 10:50
Last Modified: 13 Sep 2024 19:53
URI: http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/24753

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