Markets and microstructure

This document contains three papers examining the microstructure of financial interaction in development and market settings. I first examine the industrial organization of financial exchanges, specifically limit order markets. In this section, I perform a case study of Google stock surrounding a surprising earnings announcement in the 3rd quarter of 2009, uncovering parameters that describe information flows and liquidity provision. I then explore the disbursement process for community-driven development projects. This section is game theoretic in nature, using a novel three-player ultimatum structure. I finally develop econometric tools to simulate equilibrium and identify equilibrium models in limit order markets.

In chapter two, I estimate an equilibrium model using limit order data, finding parameters that describe information and liquidity preferences for trading. As a case study, I estimate the model for Google stock surrounding an unexpected good-news earnings announcement in the 3rd quarter of 2009. I find a substantial decrease in asymmetric information prior to the earnings announcement. I also simulate counterfactual dealer markets and find empirical evidence that limit order markets perform more efficiently than do their dealer market counterparts.

In chapter three, I examine Community-Driven Development. Community-Driven Development is considered a tool empowering communities to develop their own aid projects. While evidence has been mixed as to the effectiveness of CDD in achieving disbursement to intended beneficiaries, the literature maintains that local elites generally take control of most programs. I present a three player ultimatum game which describes a potential decentralized aid procurement process. Players successively split a dollar in aid money, and the final player--the targeted community member--decides between whistle blowing or not. Despite the elite capture present in my model, I find conditions under which money reaches targeted recipients. My results describe a perverse possibility in the decentralized aid process which could make detection of elite capture more difficult than previously considered. These processes may reconcile recent empirical work claiming effectiveness of the decentralized aid process with case studies which claim otherwise.

In chapter four, I develop in more depth the empirical and computational means to estimate model parameters in the case study in chapter two. I describe the liquidity supplier problem and equilibrium among those suppliers. I then outline the analytical forms for computing certainty-equivalent utilities for the informed trader. Following this, I describe a recursive algorithm which facilitates computing equilibrium in supply curves. Finally, I outline implementation of the Method of Simulated Moments in this context, focusing on Indirect Inference and formulating the pseudo model.