market friction

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Expected Returns: An Investor's Guide to Harvesting Market Rewards by Antti Ilmanen

Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, asset allocation, asset-backed security, availability heuristic, backtesting, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, Bob Litterman, bond market vigilante , book value, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, buy low sell high, capital asset pricing model, capital controls, carbon credits, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, classic study, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, commodity trading advisor, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, deal flow, debt deflation, deglobalization, delta neutral, demand response, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, diversification, diversified portfolio, dividend-yielding stocks, equity premium, equity risk premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, Flash crash, framing effect, frictionless, frictionless market, G4S, George Akerlof, global macro, global reserve currency, Google Earth, high net worth, hindsight bias, Hyman Minsky, implied volatility, income inequality, incomplete markets, index fund, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, inverted yield curve, invisible hand, John Bogle, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, laissez-faire capitalism, law of one price, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, low interest rates, managed futures, margin call, market bubble, market clearing, market friction, market fundamentalism, market microstructure, mental accounting, merger arbitrage, mittelstand, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, negative equity, New Journalism, oil shock, p-value, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, pension time bomb, performance metric, Phillips curve, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, price anchoring, price stability, principal–agent problem, private sector deleveraging, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, riskless arbitrage, Robert Shiller, savings glut, search costs, selection bias, seminal paper, Sharpe ratio, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, stochastic volatility, stock buybacks, stocks for the long run, survivorship bias, systematic trading, tail risk, The Great Moderation, The Myth of the Rational Market, too big to fail, transaction costs, tulip mania, value at risk, volatility arbitrage, volatility smile, working-age population, Y2K, yield curve, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

Many financial intermediaries and investors became forced sellers as market frictions prevented them and other investors from taking advantage of good deals or nearly riskless arbitrage opportunities. Opportunities that appeared compelling over the long horizon could not be taken due to the possibility that further de-levering and related mark-to-market volatility would make the investment positions unsustainable over the short run. A diverse literature on market frictions explains why asset prices might deviate from fair values or respond sluggishly to new information. However, few asset-pricing models relate asset risk premia to market frictions such as funding and liquidity constraints.

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• Market segmentation effects may be even more pronounced across countries given that the liberalization of foreign capital flows is incomplete. The full integration of all countries into global markets is a hoped-for outcome, not a reality. Market frictions and illiquidity premia The impact of supply–demand factors—and of investor irrationalities—on asset prices is made possible by market frictions. Frictions related to illiquidity, funding constraints, and trading costs, as well as counterparty risk, agency concerns, and other information problems can be first-order important, as the 2008 experience shows. Bearish expectations, elevated risk, and risk aversion do not alone explain the distressed price levels of securitized bonds and other assets.

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The long bull trend in emerging market assets amidst a gradual improvement in emerging market fundamentals is another example where data are consistent with investor irrationality as well as rational learning. Peso problems and learning stories help in interpreting past return predictability but contain no lessons about future profit opportunities. Market frictions Most academic predictability evidence is presented without taking into account trading costs and other market frictions. It is not surprising, then, that paper profits tend to be most consistent in illiquid assets (e.g., small-cap stocks) or in trading styles that involve high turnover (e.g., short-term reversal). Faced with evidence of profitable trading strategies, it is always reasonable to question whether trading cost estimates (including both direct costs and market impact) have been understated.

The Inner Lives of Markets: How People Shape Them—And They Shape Us by Tim Sullivan

Abraham Wald, Airbnb, airport security, Al Roth, Alvin Roth, Andrei Shleifer, attribution theory, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Brownian motion, business cycle, buy and hold, centralized clearinghouse, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, classic study, clean water, conceptual framework, congestion pricing, constrained optimization, continuous double auction, creative destruction, data science, deferred acceptance, Donald Trump, Dutch auction, Edward Glaeser, experimental subject, first-price auction, framing effect, frictionless, fundamental attribution error, George Akerlof, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gunnar Myrdal, helicopter parent, information asymmetry, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, late fees, linear programming, Lyft, market clearing, market design, market friction, medical residency, multi-sided market, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, Occupy movement, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pez dispenser, power law, pre–internet, price mechanism, price stability, prisoner's dilemma, profit motive, proxy bid, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, school choice, school vouchers, scientific management, sealed-bid auction, second-price auction, second-price sealed-bid, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, techno-determinism, technoutopianism, telemarketer, The Market for Lemons, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, transaction costs, two-sided market, uber lyft, uranium enrichment, Vickrey auction, Vilfredo Pareto, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, winner-take-all economy

Airbnb is an epic leap forward when compared to the epic leap of faith involved in renting a room via its predecessors, the classified ads or Craigslist. But let’s not confuse a set of groundbreaking market innovations with the end of market frictions. Yes, there are entire websites devoted to Airbnb horror stories—the trashed homes, the tenant-turned-squatter. There’s an equal number of angry rants directed at Uber. Neither of us rents our idle real estate assets when we’re out of town and not because we’re old-fashioned. We’ve also experienced market frictions of a more mundane variety. In writing this book we went to Washington to interview George Akerlof of market-for-lemons fame. As a bit of add-on market research, one of us, Ray, decided to rent an apartment for the night via Airbnb.

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But to get your $60 billion valuation, you need to create as many frictions as possible for everyone else. Although proponents of the sharing economy tout its ability to reduce market frictions, the only way they’re going to make the kinds of profits they (and their investors) want is to create new ones. That’s something they’re not interested in talking about to the public at large, or to their representatives in government. This leaves a bit of a paradox in the techno-utopian free-market narrative. A great entrepreneur will use technology to create a fantastic new market, then will use technology to set up market frictions to protect it. As entrepreneur and venture capitalist Peter Thiel wrote in the Wall Street Journal, “Competition Is for Losers.”12 Don’t get us wrong.

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If friction—informational, transactional, contractual—is all that stands between textbook economic models and the functioning of our real economy, then there is a vocal contingent out there (“there” being mostly Silicon Valley) that sees technology as the solution. When viewed through the lens of market frictions, the much-hyped notion of the sharing economy can be seen as an effort to bring free-market salvation to bricks, mortars, and automobiles. If you’ve ever tried to hail a taxi in San Francisco or rent a room in Washington, DC, you know the frictions of which we speak. The Bay Area’s sprawl, combined with strict regulations on the cab and livery businesses, used to leave you at the mercy of the two thousand or so taxi medallion holders that covered San Francisco’s 230 square miles.

Ghost Work: How to Stop Silicon Valley From Building a New Global Underclass by Mary L. Gray, Siddharth Suri

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Apollo 13, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, Big Tech, big-box store, bitcoin, blue-collar work, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cloud computing, cognitive load, collaborative consumption, collective bargaining, computer vision, corporate social responsibility, cotton gin, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, deskilling, digital divide, do well by doing good, do what you love, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, employer provided health coverage, en.wikipedia.org, equal pay for equal work, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, financial independence, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, fulfillment center, future of work, gig economy, glass ceiling, global supply chain, hiring and firing, ImageNet competition, independent contractor, industrial robot, informal economy, information asymmetry, Jeff Bezos, job automation, knowledge economy, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, machine translation, market friction, Mars Rover, natural language processing, new economy, operational security, passive income, pattern recognition, post-materialism, post-work, power law, race to the bottom, Rana Plaza, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Coase, scientific management, search costs, Second Machine Age, sentiment analysis, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, software as a service, speech recognition, spinning jenny, Stephen Hawking, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, The Nature of the Firm, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, two-sided market, union organizing, universal basic income, Vilfredo Pareto, Wayback Machine, women in the workforce, work culture , Works Progress Administration, Y Combinator, Yochai Benkler

In Proceedings of the 25th International Conference on World Wide Web, WWW ’16, pages 1293–1303, Republic and Canton of Geneva, Switzerland, 2016. © International World Wide Web Conference Committee. Used with permission. All rights reserved. Sara Constance Kingsley, Mary L. Gray, and Siddharth Suri. “Accounting for Market Frictions and Power Asymmetries in Online Labor Markets.” Policy & Internet, 7(4):383–400, 2015. © 2015 Policy Studies Organization. Used with permission by Wiley Periodicals, Inc. All rights reserved. hmhbooks.com Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Gray, Mary L., author. | Suri, Siddharth, author.

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Nobel laureate Ronald Coase, a key contributor to modern economic theory, popularized the notion of transaction costs, though he did not coin the phrase itself. His seminal 1937 article “The Nature of the Firm” was published only two years after Wagner passed the National Labor Relations Act. In it, Coase argued that businesses had to coordinate their operations, such as finding, hiring, and training workers, to reduce market frictions. The only route to lower costs and to turning a profit hinged on making businesses run as smoothly as possible. In essence, he was the first economist to theorize how to produce at scale through modern private enterprise and profit from a well-oiled org chart. Ghost work economies sell themselves as software that can eliminate the expensive frictions of searching, matching, training, communicating with, and retaining workers.

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“The Rise and Nature of Alternative Work Arrangements in the United States, 1995–2015.” NBER Working Paper Series, no. 22667, National Bureau of Economic Research, Cambridge, MA, September 2016. https://doi.org/10.3386/w22667. Kingsley, Sara Constance, Mary L. Gray, and Siddharth Suri. “Accounting for Market Frictions and Power Asymmetries in Online Labor Markets.” Policy & Internet 7, no. 4 (December 1, 2015): 383–400. https://doi.org/10.1002/poi3.111. Kuehn, Kathleen, and Thomas F. Corrigan. “Hope Labor: The Role of Employment Prospects in Online Social Production.” Political Economy of Communication 1, no. 1 (May 16, 2013). http://www.polecom.org/index.php/polecom/article/view/9.

Efficiently Inefficient: How Smart Money Invests and Market Prices Are Determined by Lasse Heje Pedersen

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, Andrei Shleifer, asset allocation, backtesting, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Black-Scholes formula, book value, Brownian motion, business cycle, buy and hold, buy low sell high, buy the rumour, sell the news, capital asset pricing model, commodity trading advisor, conceptual framework, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, currency peg, currency risk, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, discounted cash flows, diversification, diversified portfolio, Emanuel Derman, equity premium, equity risk premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial engineering, fixed income, Flash crash, floating exchange rates, frictionless, frictionless market, global macro, Gordon Gekko, implied volatility, index arbitrage, index fund, interest rate swap, junk bonds, late capitalism, law of one price, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, managed futures, margin call, market clearing, market design, market friction, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, merger arbitrage, money market fund, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, New Journalism, paper trading, passive investing, Phillips curve, price discovery process, price stability, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Robert Shiller, selection bias, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, short selling, short squeeze, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, stocks for the long run, stocks for the long term, survivorship bias, systematic trading, tail risk, technology bubble, time dilation, time value of money, total factor productivity, transaction costs, two and twenty, value at risk, Vanguard fund, yield curve, zero-coupon bond

One driver of investment is how low the real interest rate is, which depends in part on the inflation risk premium (i.e., stable inflation is best) and the rule of law. Also, supply shocks can arise from changes in labor-market frictions (sticky wages, search frictions, and rigid labor laws), product-market frictions (sticky prices and anticompetitive corporate measures), and capital-market frictions (market and funding illiquidity) leading to unemployment and lower capital utilization. For instance, a systemic banking crisis slows growth because the ability to finance projects is a driver of investment. In the long run, output depends on supply factors such as technological progress and population growth. 11.4.

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Investors are willing to bear these costs and fees when they are outweighed by the profits that the manager is expected to extract from the efficiently inefficient market. How close are prices and returns to their fully efficient values in an efficiently inefficient market? Well, because of competition, securities’ returns net of all the relevant market frictions—transaction costs, liquidity risk, and funding costs—are very close to their fully efficient levels in the sense that consistently beating the market is extremely difficult. However, despite returns being nearly efficient, prices can deviate substantially from the present value of future cash flows.

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The Law of One Price breaks down when arbitrage opportunities arise in currency markets (defying the covered interest rate parity), credit markets (the CDS-bond basis), convertible bond markets, equity markets (Siamese twin stock spreads), and option markets. Investors exercise call options and convert convertible bonds before maturity and dividend payments when they need to free up cash or face large short sale costs (defying Merton’s Rule). The financial market frictions influence the real economy, and unconventional monetary policy, such as central banks’ lending facility, can be important in addressing liquidity draughts.4 TABLE I.1. PRINCIPLES OF NEOCLASSICAL FINANCE AND ECONOMICS VS. THOSE IN AN EFFICIENTLY INEFFICIENT MARKET Neoclassical Finance and Economics Efficiently Inefficient Markets Modigliani–Miller Irrelevance of capital structure Capital structure matters because of funding frictions Two-Fund Separation Everyone buys portfolios of market and cash Investors choose different portfolios depending on their individual funding constraints Capital Asset Pricing Model Expected return proportional to market risk Liquidity risk and funding constraints influence expected returns Law of One Price and Black–Scholes No arbitrage, implied derivative prices Arbitrage opportunities arise as demand pressure affects derivative prices Merton’s Rule Never exercise a call option and never convert a convertible, except at maturity/dividends Optimal early exercise and conversion free up cash, save on short sale costs, and limit transaction costs Real Business Cycles and Ricardian Equivalence Macroeconomic irrelevance of policy and finance Credit cycles and liquidity spirals driven by the interaction of macro, asset prices, and funding constraints Taylor Rule Monetary focus on interest rate policy Two monetary tools are interest rate (the cost of loans) and collateral policy (the size of loans) II.

Matchmakers: The New Economics of Multisided Platforms by David S. Evans, Richard Schmalensee

Airbnb, Alvin Roth, Andy Rubin, big-box store, business process, cashless society, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, creative destruction, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, disruptive innovation, if you build it, they will come, information asymmetry, Internet Archive, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invention of the telegraph, invention of the telephone, Jean Tirole, John Markoff, Lyft, M-Pesa, market friction, market microstructure, Max Levchin, mobile money, multi-sided market, Network effects, PalmPilot, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, QR code, ride hailing / ride sharing, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, the long tail, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, two-sided market, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, vertical integration, Victor Gruen, Wayback Machine, winner-take-all economy

Multisided Platforms In 1998, this important type of business didn’t have a name. That’s surprising, in retrospect. Many businesses had been built to reduce these sorts of market frictions, which economists tend to call transaction costs. Their basic business model had been around for thousands of years. But business schools didn’t teach classes on how to start or run businesses that help different parties get together to exchange value. Economists didn’t have a clue how these businesses worked. In fact, the companies that reduced these market frictions charged prices and adopted other strategies that economic textbooks insisted no sensible business would do.

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The bigger the friction, the greater the value the platform can potentially provide, the greater the opportunity for getting participants on board, and the greater the chance for the platform to make money. Knowing which type of participants benefits the most from eliminating that friction can guide decisions on ignition strategies as well as on pricing. Sometimes, as with OpenTable, the platform drastically reduces a clear market friction, and the issue is whether the friction is big enough to enable the platform to earn adequate revenue to cover all the costs of launching and running the platform. In other cases, the platform pioneer has identified a new way for participants to interact—one that no one recognized because there was no way to do it.

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Less than ten years later, in 2014, more than 84 percent of Kenyan mobile phone users, including many of the very poor, were able to use their mobile phones to transfer money to each other, to pay their bills, and to pay at stores.7 People can now also use new financial services available through their mobile money accounts to save money and take out loans, and many do.8 Increasingly, stores are accepting mobile money for payment. The way this happened in Kenya is a remarkable story of how a company figured out how to ignite a multisided platform in trying circumstances, to massively reduce important market frictions, and to provide financial services to millions of impoverished people. And it is a story of how multisided platforms—M-PESA and other mobile money schemes that have started in Kenya and elsewhere—are leapfrogging traditional industries. Kenyans don’t need to rely on banks for many financial services.

How I Became a Quant: Insights From 25 of Wall Street's Elite by Richard R. Lindsey, Barry Schachter

Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, Andrew Wiles, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, asset allocation, asset-backed security, backtesting, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Black-Scholes formula, Bob Litterman, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, Bretton Woods, Brownian motion, business cycle, business process, butter production in bangladesh, buy and hold, buy low sell high, capital asset pricing model, centre right, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computerized markets, corporate governance, correlation coefficient, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency risk, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, diversification, Donald Knuth, Edward Thorp, Emanuel Derman, en.wikipedia.org, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, full employment, George Akerlof, global macro, Gordon Gekko, hiring and firing, implied volatility, index fund, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, Ivan Sutherland, John Bogle, John von Neumann, junk bonds, linear programming, Loma Prieta earthquake, Long Term Capital Management, machine readable, margin call, market friction, market microstructure, martingale, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, Myron Scholes, Nick Leeson, P = NP, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, pensions crisis, performance metric, prediction markets, profit maximization, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, QWERTY keyboard, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, seminal paper, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, short selling, Silicon Valley, six sigma, sorting algorithm, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, stem cell, Steven Levy, stochastic process, subscription business, systematic trading, technology bubble, The Great Moderation, the scientific method, too big to fail, trade route, transaction costs, transfer pricing, value at risk, volatility smile, Wiener process, yield curve, young professional

I remember making ample use of hyperbolic tangent functions to represent the value of information without having to worry about my estimates of expected returns getting too far above the bid or below the offer. Modeling stocks in a microstructure framework, for the purpose of earning a profit, is all about modeling market frictions. Bid/offer spreads are a market friction; so is the fact that markets have to open and close and that you cannot trade in unlimited size. This was hardly sexy stuff in the early 1990s, when all the rage was customized curvature in the form of structured derivative products or over-the-counter options. At that time, quantitative finance was all about improving upon Black-Scholes.

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Everything I had seen in the finance literature up to this point searched for market anomalies using closing prices or assumed continuous, single-price processes. And yet, this was not the way the world worked, I thought. Stocks trade in a double-auction framework. A trade results from someone hitting a bid, taking an offer, or two sides agreeing in the middle. So looking at how stocks moved short-term meant studying market frictions and the discreteness of how stocks moved from bid/offer to bid/offer. As far as I could tell, no one had studied this before. There was no box; so thinking out of it was all one could do. It was then I figured out how I wanted to make my mark. JWPR007-Lindsey April 30, 2007 16:14 Andrew J.

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See Schulman “Beating the Foreign Exchange Markets” (Sweeney), 190 Beder, Tanya Styblo, 285–294 Bedriftsøkonomusik Institutt (BI), 153–154 “Behavior of Stock Prices, The” (Fama), 266 Berman, Gregg E., 49–66 Bermudan Monte Carlo techniques, 174 Bernstein Fabozzi/Jacobs Levy Award, 192 Best practices, analysis (absence), 128 Bid/offer spreads, market friction, 325 381 Binary options (pricing), call spreads (usage), 122 Binomial trees, trinomial tree extension, 124 Blacher, Guillamume, 167 Black, Fischer, 11, 88, 172, 224 analytic software, development, 23 input, 217 Kahn visit, 44–45 Leinweber, meeting, 23 predecessor, 228 Black boxes, usage, 209 Black-Scholes and Beyond (Chriss), 124–125, 132 Black-Scholes-Merton option pricing formula, 278 Bloom, Norman, 25 Bloomberg, Mike (employ).

Reinventing the Bazaar: A Natural History of Markets by John McMillan

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Albert Einstein, Alvin Roth, Andrei Shleifer, Anton Chekhov, Asian financial crisis, classic study, congestion charging, corporate governance, corporate raider, crony capitalism, Dava Sobel, decentralized internet, Deng Xiaoping, Dutch auction, electricity market, experimental economics, experimental subject, fear of failure, first-price auction, frictionless, frictionless market, George Akerlof, George Gilder, global village, Great Leap Forward, Hacker News, Hernando de Soto, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, informal economy, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, job-hopping, John Harrison: Longitude, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, land reform, lone genius, manufacturing employment, market clearing, market design, market friction, market microstructure, means of production, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, ought to be enough for anybody, pez dispenser, pre–internet, price mechanism, profit maximization, profit motive, proxy bid, purchasing power parity, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, sealed-bid auction, search costs, second-price auction, Silicon Valley, spectrum auction, Stewart Brand, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, transaction costs, War on Poverty, world market for maybe five computers, Xiaogang Anhui farmers, yield management

The Nobel laureates’ critique has now been addressed. Modern economics has a lot to say about the workings of markets. Theorists have opened up the black box of supply and demand and peered inside. Game theory has been brought to bear on the processes of exchange. Examining markets up close, the new economics emphasizes market frictions and how they are kept in check. In 2001, this work received recognition with the award of the Nobel Prize in economics to George Akerlof, Michael Spence, and Joseph Stiglitz for laying the foundation, as the Nobel citation said, “for a general theory of markets with asymmetric information.” Expressed in mathematics and impenetrable jargon, these new ideas reside obscurely in the technical journals.

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Big effects can come from small transaction costs. Today’s economics has the problem of information at its core. The “biggest new concept in economics in the last thirty years,” Kenneth Arrow said in 2000, “is the development of the importance of information, along with the dispersion of information.”4 Two kinds of market frictions arise from the uneven supply of information. There are search costs: the time, effort, and money spent learning what is available where for how much. And there are evaluation costs, arising from the difficulties buyers have in assessing quality. A successful market has mechanisms that hold down the costs of transacting that come from the dispersion of information.

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Firms that contract out some of their production—buying rather than making—place their trust in the market mechanism. If markets achieve such impressive efficiencies, why are so many transactions deliberately taken out of the market and put into the planned sub-economies that are firms? Why isn’t everyone an independent contractor instead of a hired employee? The answer is that firms exist as a response to market frictions. Sometimes it is less expensive to run a hierarchy than to use the market. Whether a firm produces its inputs in-house or procures them from other firms depends on the relative costs of each form of transaction. One of the factors affecting this comparison, as Ronald Coase wrote in 1937, is the efficiency with which markets work.

High-Frequency Trading: A Practical Guide to Algorithmic Strategies and Trading Systems by Irene Aldridge

algorithmic trading, asset allocation, asset-backed security, automated trading system, backtesting, Black Swan, Brownian motion, business cycle, business process, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, centralized clearinghouse, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, computerized trading, diversification, equity premium, fault tolerance, financial engineering, financial intermediation, fixed income, global macro, high net worth, implied volatility, index arbitrage, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, inventory management, Jim Simons, law of one price, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, machine readable, margin call, market friction, market microstructure, martingale, Myron Scholes, New Journalism, p-value, paper trading, performance metric, Performance of Mutual Funds in the Period, pneumatic tube, profit motive, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Sharpe ratio, short selling, Small Order Execution System, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, stochastic process, stochastic volatility, systematic trading, tail risk, trade route, transaction costs, value at risk, yield curve, zero-sum game

Tough market conditions, an unexpected change in regulation, or terrorist events can destroy credible public companies overnight. r Transaction costs may wipe out all the profitability of stat-arb trading, particularly for investors deploying high leverage or limited capital. r The bid-ask spread may be wide enough to cancel any gains obtained from the strategy. r Finally, the pair’s performance may be determined by the sizes of the chosen stocks along with other market frictions—for example, price jumps in response to earnings announcements. Careful measurement and management of risks, however, can deliver high stat-arb profitability. Gatev, Goetzmann, and Rouwenhorst (2006) document that the out-of-sample back tests conducted on the daily equity data from 1967 to 1997 using their stat-arb strategy delivered Sharpe ratios well in excess of 4.

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Miller and P. Sandas, 2004. “Empirical Analysis of Limit Order Markets.” Review of Economic Studies 71, 1027–1063. Horner, Melchior R., 1988. “The Value of the Corporate Voting Right: Evidence from Switzerland,” Journal of Banking and Finance 12 (1), 69–84. Hou, K. and T.J. Moskowitz, 2005. “Market Frictions, Price Delay, and the CrossSection of Expected Returns.” Review of Financial Studies 18, 981–1020. References 315 Howell, M.J., 2001. “Fund Age and Performance,” Journal of Alternative Investments 4. No. 2, 57–60. Huang, R. and H. Stoll, 1997. “The Components of the Bid-ask Spread: A General Approach.”

Topics in Market Microstructure by Ilija I. Zovko

Brownian motion, computerized trading, continuous double auction, correlation coefficient, financial intermediation, Gini coefficient, information asymmetry, market design, market friction, market microstructure, Murray Gell-Mann, p-value, power law, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, stochastic process, stochastic volatility, transaction costs

Schwartz, editors, Market Making and the Changing Structure of the Securities Industry. Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham, 1985. T. E. Copeland and D. Galai. Information effects on the bid-ask spread. Journal of Finance, 38(5):1457–69, 1983. M. G. Daniels, J. D. Farmer, G. Iori, and E. Smith. Quantitative model of price diffusion and market friction based on trading as a mechanistic random process. Physical Review Letters, 90(10): Article no. 108102, 2003. H. Demsetz. The cost of transacting. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 82:33–53, 1968. P. M. Dixon, J. Weiner, T. Mitchell-Olds, and R. Woodley. Bootstrapping the gini coefficient of inequality.

Handbook of Modeling High-Frequency Data in Finance by Frederi G. Viens, Maria C. Mariani, Ionut Florescu

algorithmic trading, asset allocation, automated trading system, backtesting, Bear Stearns, Black-Scholes formula, book value, Brownian motion, business process, buy and hold, continuous integration, corporate governance, discrete time, distributed generation, fear index, financial engineering, fixed income, Flash crash, housing crisis, implied volatility, incomplete markets, linear programming, machine readable, mandelbrot fractal, market friction, market microstructure, martingale, Menlo Park, p-value, pattern recognition, performance metric, power law, principal–agent problem, random walk, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk/return, short selling, statistical model, stochastic process, stochastic volatility, transaction costs, value at risk, volatility smile, Wiener process

(10.29) It follows that the MSE of the Fourier estimator does not diverge, and it is not significantly affected by microstructure noise; in fact, by conveniently choosing N , we obtain that MSEF and MSEFm differ by the positive constant term (Eq. 10.29). We conclude that the Fourier estimator needs no correction in order to be asymptotically unbiased and robust to market frictions of MA(1)-type, that is, the microstructure noise is represented by independent identically distributed random variables. The result is generalized to noise correlated with the efficient returns in Mancino and Sanfelici (2008). 10.3.2 MONTE CARLO ANALYSIS The theoretical results above can be reproduced by simulating discrete data from a continuous time stochastic volatility model with microstructure noise as in Mancino and Sanfelici (2008).

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Barndorff-Nielsen OE, Graversen SE, Jacod J, Shephard N. Limit theorems for bipower variation in financial econometrics. Economet Theor 2006;22(4):677–719. Barndorff-Nielsen OE, Hansen PR, Lunde A, Shephard N. Realized kernels can consistently estimate integrated variance: correcting realized variance for the effect of market frictions. Working paper, 2005. Barndorff-Nielsen OE, Hansen PR, Lunde A, Shephard N. Designing realized kernels to measure the ex-post variation of equity prices in the presence of noise. Econometrica 2008;76/6:1481–1536. Barndorff-Nielsen OE, Hansen PR, Lunde A, Shephard N. Multivariate realized kernels: consistent positive semi-definite estimators of the covariation of equity prices with noise and non-synchronous trading.

Trading and Exchanges: Market Microstructure for Practitioners by Larry Harris

active measures, Andrei Shleifer, AOL-Time Warner, asset allocation, automated trading system, barriers to entry, Bernie Madoff, Bob Litterman, book value, business cycle, buttonwood tree, buy and hold, compound rate of return, computerized trading, corporate governance, correlation coefficient, data acquisition, diversified portfolio, equity risk premium, fault tolerance, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, floating exchange rates, High speed trading, index arbitrage, index fund, information asymmetry, information retrieval, information security, interest rate swap, invention of the telegraph, job automation, junk bonds, law of one price, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, margin call, market bubble, market clearing, market design, market fragmentation, market friction, market microstructure, money market fund, Myron Scholes, National best bid and offer, Nick Leeson, open economy, passive investing, pattern recognition, payment for order flow, Ponzi scheme, post-materialism, price discovery process, price discrimination, principal–agent problem, profit motive, proprietary trading, race to the bottom, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, rent-seeking, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, search costs, selection bias, shareholder value, short selling, short squeeze, Small Order Execution System, speech recognition, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, survivorship bias, the market place, transaction costs, two-sided market, vertical integration, winner-take-all economy, yield curve, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

Regulators like liquidity because liquid markets are often less volatile than illiquid ones. * * * ▶ Market Frictions Economists like liquid markets—securities markets, contract markets, product markets, and labor markets—because their models work better when they do not have to consider how transaction costs affect economic decisions. When confronted with transaction costs, people trade less often. If the costs are high enough, they do not trade at all. Transaction costs in an economic system therefore are like frictions in a mechanical system. They both slow things down and can ultimately stop all activity. Economists therefore call transaction costs market frictions. ◀ * * * Everyone in the markets has some affect on liquidity.

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., utilitarian traders traders of last resort, 497 trader surplus definition of, 123 examples of, 123, 125 measuring, 124 in single price auction, 122–2 5 trader timing, 437 trades and trading cash commodity and futures market, 22–26 with dealers, 281–82 facilitators, 34–36, 38, 248 foreign exchange, 29–30 free entry and exit, 7–8 futures market, 22–26, 39, 46 industry, 32–67 information asymmetries, 7 institutional in Nasdaq stock, 19–20 institutional in NYSE stock, 15–19 magnitude of, 45–47 markets, 44–59 overview of, 5–6 players in, 32–34, 145 private benefits of, 205 profits, 4, 7 public benefits of, 206 reasons for, 176–201, 252 retail in Nasdaq stock, 14–15 retail in NYSE stock, 11–14 rules, 7, 94, 95, 112, 113 straddle, 37 structure of, 31–174 and technology, 524–26 very large stock block, 20–22 See also bond(s); option(s); traders; trading instruments trading floors, 24–25, 90, 116 trading forums, 90 trading halts, 572, 573–75, 578 trading hours, 92 trading instruments definition of, 38 derivative contracts, 41–42 financial assets, 39–41 gambling contracts, 43 hybrid contracts, 43–44 insurance contracts, 43 real assets, 39 trading pits, 24–25, 90, 116 Trading Places (movie), 242 trading posts, 90, 116 trading sessions, 89, 90–92 Trading System View (TSV), 48, 51 trading window, 588 tranches, 41 Transaction Auditing Group, 424, 519 transaction costs, 4 and active managers, 488 components, 421–22 definition of, 180, 421 econometric estimation methods, 422, 423, 432, 434 estimation methods, 422–23 estimator biases, 428–31 gaming problem, 430–31 and hedging, 188 implicit, 432, 434 intelligent management, 439–40 as market frictions, 394 measurment, 420–41 missed trade opportunity costs, 434, 436–38 and paying the spread, 71 prediction, 438–39 properties of price benchmark estimators, 427–32, 433 and public benefits of exchange, 214 specified price benchmark methods, 422, 423–27 trade timing issues, 427–28 transaction cost spread component, 299 transaction fees, 494 transaction taxes, 572, 575–76 transitory exchange for physical, 334 transitory price changes, 299 transitory price effect, 435 transitory spread component.

Capitalism and Freedom by Milton Friedman

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", affirmative action, Berlin Wall, central bank independence, Corn Laws, Deng Xiaoping, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, invisible hand, Joseph Schumpeter, liquidity trap, market friction, minimum wage unemployment, price discrimination, rent control, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, Simon Kuznets, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, union organizing

The potential gains, particularly to early entrants, are so great that it would be worth incurring extremely heavy administrative costs.10 Whatever the reason, an imperfection of the market has led to underinvestment in human capital. Government intervention might therefore be rationalized on grounds both of “technical monopoly,” insofar as the obstacle to the development of such investment has been administrative costs, and of improving the operation of the market, insofar as it has been simply market frictions and rigidities. If government does intervene, how should it do so? One obvious form of intervention, and the only form that has so far been taken, is outright government subsidy of vocational or professional schooling financed out of general revenues. This form seems clearly inappropriate. Investment should be carried to the point at which the extra return repays the investment and yields the market rate of interest on it.

Empirical Market Microstructure: The Institutions, Economics and Econometrics of Securities Trading by Joel Hasbrouck

Alvin Roth, barriers to entry, business cycle, conceptual framework, correlation coefficient, discrete time, disintermediation, distributed generation, experimental economics, financial intermediation, index arbitrage, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, inventory management, market clearing, market design, market friction, market microstructure, martingale, payment for order flow, power law, price discovery process, price discrimination, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Richard Thaler, second-price auction, selection bias, short selling, statistical model, stochastic process, stochastic volatility, transaction costs, two-sided market, ultimatum game, zero-sum game

Each of the other 99 customers will perceive an opportunity cost of $10 (=$110 − $100) and may well attribute this to sloth on the part of their brokers or their systems. Thus, the aggregate opportunity cost is $990, for an aggregate implementation shortfall of $991. It is nonsensical, of course, to suggest that aggregate welfare could be enhanced by this amount if market frictions or broker ineptitude were eliminated. The problem is that the benchmark price of π0 = $100 does not come close, given the new information, to clearing the market. The profits realized by the lucky first trader are akin to lottery winnings. Individual traders might attempt to gain advantage by increasing the speed of their order submission linkages, but because only one trader can arrive first, the situation is fundamentally a tournament (in the economic sense). 14.2.1 The Implementation Cost for Liquidity Suppliers Is implementation cost a useful criterion for liquidity suppliers?

What's Wrong With Economics: A Primer for the Perplexed by Robert Skidelsky

additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, behavioural economics, Black Swan, Bretton Woods, business cycle, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, cognitive bias, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, degrowth, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, full employment, George Akerlof, George Santayana, global supply chain, global village, Gunnar Myrdal, happiness index / gross national happiness, hindsight bias, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, index fund, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, Internet Archive, invisible hand, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, labour market flexibility, loss aversion, Mahbub ul Haq, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, market friction, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, Modern Monetary Theory, moral hazard, paradox of thrift, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, precariat, price anchoring, principal–agent problem, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, sunk-cost fallacy, survivorship bias, technoutopianism, The Chicago School, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transfer pricing, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, Wolfgang Streeck, zero-sum game

But Walrasian equilibrium requires contracts for future delivery of goods and services at prices which can only be guessed at. A great deal of trading in actual markets therefore takes place at the ‘wrong’, or disequilibrium, prices. This means that equilibrium cannot be proved to be the result of a myriad of voluntary transactions in markets. Frictions in the social world are much more severe than those in physics, because they are caused by the human beings whose behaviour we are trying to explain. Thus the existence of frictions such as ‘sticky wages’ might explain persisting unemployment. To the fervent globalist, nations are frictions to the more perfect integration of markets.

Humans as a Service: The Promise and Perils of Work in the Gig Economy by Jeremias Prassl

3D printing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, algorithmic management, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andrei Shleifer, asset light, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, call centre, cashless society, Clayton Christensen, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, death from overwork, Didi Chuxing, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, full employment, future of work, George Akerlof, gig economy, global supply chain, Greyball, hiring and firing, income inequality, independent contractor, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, low skilled workers, Lyft, machine readable, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, market friction, means of production, moral hazard, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, pattern recognition, platform as a service, Productivity paradox, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, remote working, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Ronald Coase, Rosa Parks, scientific management, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Simon Singh, software as a service, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, TechCrunch disrupt, The Future of Employment, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, transaction costs, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, two tier labour market, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, union organizing, warehouse automation, work culture , working-age population

Through technological innovation, from location tracking and user ratings, to sophisticated algorithms that match consumers and workers, whether purely online or in the real world, platforms have drastically reduced this friction: using Amazon’s MTurk, an economist in Australia can quickly find a student in the United States to help her to organize data in a large spreadsheet. Even better, matching isn’t the only market friction removed by the platform. In an open-market transaction with an independent entrepreneur, consumers would have to spend significant amounts of time and effort to find out information about the service provider’s background and experi- ence, control the quality of the work, and negotiate prices.

Where Does Money Come From?: A Guide to the UK Monetary & Banking System by Josh Ryan-Collins, Tony Greenham, Richard Werner, Andrew Jackson

bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Basel III, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, book value, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, cashless society, central bank independence, credit crunch, currency risk, double entry bookkeeping, en.wikipedia.org, eurozone crisis, fiat currency, financial innovation, fixed income, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, global reserve currency, Goodhart's law, Hyman Minsky, inflation targeting, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, Joseph Schumpeter, low skilled workers, market clearing, market design, market friction, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, Post-Keynesian economics, price mechanism, price stability, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, Real Time Gross Settlement, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, seigniorage, special drawing rights, the payments system, trade route, transaction costs

Since the rate charged on the loans is the Monetary Policy Committee’s policy rate, and the demand for reserves is met by the supply from the central bank, traded rates in the money market tend to be close to the policy rate. However, in some instances market rates can deviate from the policy rate. This is usually due to some kind of market friction or loss of confidence, or could result from a bank being short of reserves and unable to meet its commitments in the interbank market. If the central bank believes there is merit in supplying extra liquidity in the interbank market – normally indicated by the interbank rate (LIBOR or the actual rate paid by banks which may be known to the Bank of England) going significantly above the policy rate – it can make additional loans to the banks, collateralised by government securities, or it can engage in outright asset purchases.

The Road to Somewhere: The Populist Revolt and the Future of Politics by David Goodhart

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, assortative mating, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, borderless world, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, carbon footprint, central bank independence, centre right, coherent worldview, corporate governance, credit crunch, Crossrail, deglobalization, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, Etonian, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, falling living standards, first-past-the-post, gender pay gap, gig economy, glass ceiling, global supply chain, global village, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, Jeremy Corbyn, job satisfaction, knowledge economy, labour market flexibility, low skilled workers, market friction, mass immigration, meritocracy, mittelstand, Neil Kinnock, New Urbanism, non-tariff barriers, North Sea oil, obamacare, old-boy network, open borders, open immigration, Peter Singer: altruism, post-industrial society, post-materialism, postnationalism / post nation state, race to the bottom, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, shareholder value, Skype, Sloane Ranger, stem cell, the long tail, Thomas L Friedman, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, ultimatum game, upwardly mobile, wages for housework, white flight, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, World Values Survey

Global villagers, who generally regard the nation state as a hindrance to desirable economic and social outcomes, have had too loud a voice in the globalisation story in the past generation. It was their choices that led to hyperglobalisation, including at the regional level with the attempt to create a single fiscal and economic space within the European Union. Under the banner of free global trade and European integration they battled against the market ‘frictions’ which many people regard as vital national interests. As Rodrik points out, the US, Japan and Europe have all grown rich with very different histories and institutional arrangements governing labour markets, corporate governance, welfare systems and approaches to regulation. ‘That these nations have managed to generate comparable amounts of wealth under different rules is an important reminder that there is not a single blueprint for economic success.’

Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society by Eric Posner, E. Weyl

3D printing, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, anti-communist, augmented reality, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Branko Milanovic, business process, buy and hold, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collective bargaining, commoditize, congestion pricing, Corn Laws, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, endowment effect, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, feminist movement, financial deregulation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, gamification, Garrett Hardin, George Akerlof, global macro, global supply chain, guest worker program, hydraulic fracturing, Hyperloop, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, index fund, informal economy, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jean Tirole, Jeremy Corbyn, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, Landlord’s Game, liberal capitalism, low skilled workers, Lyft, market bubble, market design, market friction, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, negative equity, Network effects, obamacare, offshore financial centre, open borders, Pareto efficiency, passive investing, patent troll, Paul Samuelson, performance metric, plutocrats, pre–internet, radical decentralization, random walk, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Rory Sutherland, search costs, Second Machine Age, second-price auction, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, special economic zone, spectrum auction, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, telepresence, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, urban planning, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, women in the workforce, Zipcar

For example, a controversy raged in 2017 over Google’s role in the firing of a policy researcher critical of their business practices. 30. See Roland Bénabou & Jean Tirole, Intrinsic and Extrinsic Motivation, 70 Review of Economic Studies 489 (2003), for a survey of this literature. 31. Sara Constance Kingsley et al., Accounting for Market Frictions and Power Asymmetries in Online Labor Markets, 7 Policy & Internet 383 (2015). 32. Arindrajit Dube, Jeff Jacobs, Suresh Naidu, & Siddharth Suri, Monopsony in Crowdsourcing Labor Markets (Columbia University Working Paper, 2017). 33. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/06/business/facebook-bends-the-rules-of-audience-engagement-to-its-advantage.html?

Beyond Diversification: What Every Investor Needs to Know About Asset Allocation by Sebastien Page

Andrei Shleifer, asset allocation, backtesting, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Black Swan, Bob Litterman, book value, business cycle, buy and hold, Cal Newport, capital asset pricing model, commodity super cycle, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, currency risk, discounted cash flows, diversification, diversified portfolio, en.wikipedia.org, equity risk premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, fixed income, future of work, Future Shock, G4S, global macro, implied volatility, index fund, information asymmetry, iterative process, loss aversion, low interest rates, market friction, mental accounting, merger arbitrage, oil shock, passive investing, prediction markets, publication bias, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, reserve currency, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Robert Shiller, robo advisor, seminal paper, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, sovereign wealth fund, stochastic process, stochastic volatility, stocks for the long run, systematic bias, systematic trading, tail risk, transaction costs, TSMC, value at risk, yield curve, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

.), 204–206 Option writing, Volatility Index and, 109 Outliers, 148 Overfitting, 183 Page, Jean-Paul (JPP), 265–269 on abnormal profits, 231 on accounting for risk, 217 on asset allocation, 247 on beta, 175 on efficiency of markets, 93 on finance, 61, 83, 265, 271–272 on financial analysis, 45 on hypotheses behind models, 1 on interest rates, 5 on market frictions, 69 on measuring risk, 89 on models, 197 on Modern Portfolio Theory, 173 on normal distributions, 147 on quality of models, 121 on standard deviation, 111 on theoretical foundations of asset allocation, 271–274 on utility theory, 185 on valuation, 25 Panariello, Rob: and correlations, 140 and diversification, 122–125, 127–129 on fear, 234 and persistence of volatility, 113–114 and public vs. private equity, 228 and stock picking, 233 Park, James, 102–104 Passive investments, 269 active investments vs., 226, 231–243, 269 and blend portfolios, 233 mispricings and abnormal correlations with, 236 and stock picking, 243 “The P/B-ROE Valuation Model” (Wilcox), 28–29 Pedersen, Lasse Heje, 180, 182 Pedersen, Niels, 15–16, 59, 129, 132 Peer group risk constraint, 210 Pelizzon, Loriana, 128 Pension funds, 128, 219 “The Performance of Private Equity Funds” (Phalippou and Gottschlag), 222–224 Persistence in risk measures, 113, 148 and data frequency, 114–115 higher moments, 117–119 mean reversion at longer horizons, 115–117 volatility, 113–114, 156 Personal finance, 186–188 Phalippou, Ludovic, 222–224 PIMCO, 14, 27 Pioneering Portfolio Management (Swensen), 129 Pontiff, Jeffrey, 184 Poon, Ser-Huang, 90–91 Portfolio construction, 173–174, 268, 273 active vs. passive investments in, 231–243 with alternative assets, 229–230 asset class allocation in, 185–195 asset classes in, 173–184 full-sample correlations in, 134 private assets in, 217–229 rules of thumb for, 243–244 simplifying problem of, 203–207 single-period portfolio optimization, 197–215 stocks vs. bonds in, 185–195 strategic asset allocations for, 247–263 target-date funds in, 190–195 utility maximization in, 199–203 “The Portfolio Flows of International Investors” (Froot, O’Connell, and Seasholes), 31 Portfolio optimization, 173 allocation of stocks vs. bonds for, 193–194 mean-variance, 198, 203–207 methodologies for, 134 risk factors models in, 178–179 single-period, 194–195, 197–215 at T.

Green Philosophy: How to Think Seriously About the Planet by Roger Scruton

An Inconvenient Truth, barriers to entry, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, corporate social responsibility, demand response, Easter island, edge city, endowment effect, energy security, Exxon Valdez, failed state, food miles, garden city movement, Garrett Hardin, ghettoisation, happiness index / gross national happiness, Herbert Marcuse, hobby farmer, Howard Zinn, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, market friction, Martin Wolf, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, New Urbanism, Peter Singer: altruism, phenotype, precautionary principle, rent-seeking, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Sam Peltzman, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, tacit knowledge, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the market place, Thomas Malthus, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, University of East Anglia, urban planning, urban sprawl, Vilfredo Pareto, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

One of the great success stories of environmental management is that of smog – the curse of all major cities in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, now removed from Europe and America by laws governing household fuel. But the case also illustrates the dangers of regulation, which is apt to replace normal market friction with a regime of zero tolerance. The costs of enforcing clean air regulation in America have been so amplified by the EPA as to produce price distortions that are a serious tax on consumers.184 There are other reasons too for thinking that regulation alone will not prevent major polluters from externalizing their costs.

Market Risk Analysis, Quantitative Methods in Finance by Carol Alexander

asset allocation, backtesting, barriers to entry, Brownian motion, capital asset pricing model, constrained optimization, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, discounted cash flows, discrete time, diversification, diversified portfolio, en.wikipedia.org, financial engineering, fixed income, implied volatility, interest rate swap, low interest rates, market friction, market microstructure, p-value, performance metric, power law, proprietary trading, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, seminal paper, Sharpe ratio, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, stochastic process, stochastic volatility, systematic bias, Thomas Bayes, transaction costs, two and twenty, value at risk, volatility smile, Wiener process, yield curve, zero-sum game

In Section II.5.3.7 we prove that the discrete time version of (I.3.142) is a stationary AR(1) model. I.3.7.3 Stochastic Models for Asset Prices and Returns Time series of asset prices behave quite differently from time series of returns. In efficient markets a time series of prices or log prices will follow a random walk. More generally, even in the presence of market frictions and inefficiencies, prices and log prices of tradable assets are integrated stochastic processes. These are fundamentally different from the associated returns, which are generated by stationary stochastic processes. Figures I.3.28 and I.3.29 illustrate the fact that prices and returns are generated by very different types of stochastic process.

No Slack: The Financial Lives of Low-Income Americans by Michael S. Barr

active measures, asset allocation, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, business cycle, Cass Sunstein, cognitive load, conceptual framework, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, financial exclusion, financial innovation, Home mortgage interest deduction, income inequality, information asymmetry, it's over 9,000, labor-force participation, late fees, London Interbank Offered Rate, loss aversion, low interest rates, machine readable, market friction, mental accounting, Milgram experiment, mobile money, money market fund, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, New Urbanism, p-value, payday loans, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, search costs, subprime mortgage crisis, the payments system, transaction costs, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked

The information might improve comparison shopping. Of course, revealing such information would also reduce broker and creditor profit margins. But as the classic market competition model relies on full information and assumes rational behavior based on understanding, this proposal attempts to remove market frictions from information failures and to move market competition more toward its ideal. De-biasing consumers would reduce information asymmetry and lead to better competitive outcomes. Improving Truth in Lending Optimal disclosure will not occur in all markets through competition alone because in some contexts firms have incentives to hide information about products or prices and consumers may not insist on competition based on transparency because they misforecast their own behavior.

Beyond the Random Walk: A Guide to Stock Market Anomalies and Low Risk Investing by Vijay Singal

3Com Palm IPO, Andrei Shleifer, AOL-Time Warner, asset allocation, book value, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, correlation coefficient, cross-subsidies, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, diversified portfolio, endowment effect, fixed income, index arbitrage, index fund, information asymmetry, information security, junk bonds, liberal capitalism, locking in a profit, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, low interest rates, margin call, market friction, market microstructure, mental accounting, merger arbitrage, Myron Scholes, new economy, prediction markets, price stability, profit motive, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, selection bias, Sharpe ratio, short selling, short squeeze, survivorship bias, Tax Reform Act of 1986, transaction costs, uptick rule, Vanguard fund

Short-term price patterns considered here are of two kinds: the pattern could be a form of price drift, where the price continues to move in the same direction, or it could be a price reversal where the 56 Short-Term Price Drift price moves in the opposite direction. These price patterns may be due to market frictions, a result of market inefficiency, or related to information arrival. The earliest documentation of short-term price drift is related to earnings announcements, in which it was found that firms with surprisingly good earnings earn abnormal returns of about 2 percent in the following three months, whereas firms with surprisingly bad earnings lose abnormally.

The Euro: How a Common Currency Threatens the Future of Europe by Joseph E. Stiglitz, Alex Hyde-White

"there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, capital controls, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, cashless society, central bank independence, centre right, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, currency peg, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial innovation, full employment, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Growth in a Time of Debt, housing crisis, income inequality, incomplete markets, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, investor state dispute settlement, invisible hand, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, light touch regulation, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market bubble, market friction, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, neoliberal agenda, new economy, open economy, paradox of thrift, pension reform, pensions crisis, price stability, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, the payments system, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, Washington Consensus, working-age population

Since the start of the euro, it continues as what is sometimes called ERM II, a band linking the Danish krone to the euro. 37 Though the basic idea of full employment is clear—that everyone who would like a job can get one at the prevailing wages for those with the individual’s skills and talents—there is some controversy over the precise definition of full employment. The general notion is that the labor market is just sufficiently loose—with job seekers matching employers looking for employees—that there is no inflationary pressure. Because of labor market frictions—it takes time to find a good match between employers and employees—this “natural rate” is greater than zero, normally around 2 to 3 percent. Unemployment might also exist because of rigidities in the adjustment of relative wages—the labor market for skilled labor might be so tight that wages are rising, but there may still be unemployment of unskilled workers.

Virtual Competition by Ariel Ezrachi, Maurice E. Stucke

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic management, algorithmic trading, Arthur D. Levinson, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, cloud computing, collaborative economy, commoditize, confounding variable, corporate governance, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Graeber, deep learning, demand response, Didi Chuxing, digital capitalism, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, double helix, Downton Abbey, driverless car, electricity market, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, experimental economics, Firefox, framing effect, Google Chrome, independent contractor, index arbitrage, information asymmetry, interest rate derivative, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, light touch regulation, linked data, loss aversion, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, market friction, Milgram experiment, multi-sided market, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, nowcasting, offshore financial centre, pattern recognition, power law, prediction markets, price discrimination, price elasticity of demand, price stability, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, search costs, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart meter, Snapchat, social graph, Steve Jobs, sunk-cost fallacy, supply-chain management, telemarketer, The Chicago School, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, turn-by-turn navigation, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, yield management

Another key challenge is the legal and conceptual difficulty emerging from the relationship between man and machine—that is, humans’ con- The Enforcement Toolbox 223 trol (or lack of it) over machines, and their accountability for the algorithms’ activities.7 If algorithms collude or price discriminate, are humans liable? As several computer scientists have observed, “The amoral status of an algorithm does not negate its effects on society.”8 Or as one judge aptly noted, “Automation is effected through a human design.”9 In the context of competition and markets, friction among profit maximization, ethical trading, and consumer welfare exists. Current laws may not always resolve this friction and may fail to incentivize individuals to take responsibility for the actions of an “independent,” self-learning algorithm. When to Intervene and to What Extent Controversy may surround the timing of an intervention, its nature, and its extent.

Corporate Warriors: The Rise of the Privatized Military Industry by Peter Warren Singer

Apollo 13, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, borderless world, British Empire, colonial rule, conceptual framework, disinformation, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial independence, full employment, Global Witness, Jean Tirole, joint-stock company, Machinery of Freedom by David Friedman, market friction, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, new economy, no-fly zone, offshore financial centre, Peace of Westphalia, principal–agent problem, prisoner's dilemma, private military company, profit maximization, profit motive, RAND corporation, risk/return, rolodex, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, South China Sea, supply-chain management, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, vertical integration

What is more, the dominant theories of world politics originally drew their underlying theoretic foundations from microeconomic models. These political theories, however, certainly did not anticipate what would happen if the security system became linked with a very real market, with all its dynamic shifts and uncertainties.2 THEORY AND THE MILITARY MARKET All markets do not operate perfectly, but instead often experience market friction, interference, and externalities, particularly when their structures are still emerging. With PMFs, the marketization of military services means that international security is complicated by potential market dynamism and disruptions. The "powers" are no longer exclusively sovereign states, but also include "interdependent players caught in a network of transnational transactions."3 169 O IMPLICATIONS In short, the privatized military industry represents alternative patterns of power and authority linked to the global market, rather than limited by the territorial state.

The Volatility Smile by Emanuel Derman,Michael B.Miller

Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, Benoit Mandelbrot, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, book value, Brownian motion, capital asset pricing model, collateralized debt obligation, continuous integration, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, discrete time, diversified portfolio, dividend-yielding stocks, Emanuel Derman, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial engineering, fixed income, implied volatility, incomplete markets, law of one price, London Whale, mandelbrot fractal, market bubble, market friction, Myron Scholes, prediction markets, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, risk tolerance, riskless arbitrage, Sharpe ratio, statistical arbitrage, stochastic process, stochastic volatility, transaction costs, volatility arbitrage, volatility smile, Wiener process, yield curve, zero-coupon bond

When the index moves sharply down, short-term implied volatility moves sharply up and the short-term negative skew steepens. Long-term volatility and the long-term skew increase too, but less so (Foresi and Wu, 2005). 6. Implied volatility tends to be greater than realized volatility. This is likely due to market frictions and other factors, including hedging costs, our inability to hedge perfectly, and uncertainty with regard to future volatility. We can think of implied volatility as the market’s expected future volatility plus some premium associated with the cost of these factors. Individual Equities Single-stock smiles tend to be more symmetric than index smiles.

Money and Government: The Past and Future of Economics by Robert Skidelsky

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Alan Greenspan, anti-globalists, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, barriers to entry, Basel III, basic income, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, book value, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, constrained optimization, Corn Laws, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, fake news, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, forward guidance, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Goodhart's law, Growth in a Time of Debt, guns versus butter model, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, incomplete markets, inflation targeting, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kondratiev cycle, labour market flexibility, labour mobility, land bank, law of one price, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, liquidity trap, long and variable lags, low interest rates, market clearing, market friction, Martin Wolf, means of production, Meghnad Desai, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, mobile money, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, new economy, Nick Leeson, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, nudge theory, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open economy, paradox of thrift, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, placebo effect, post-war consensus, price stability, profit maximization, proprietary trading, public intellectual, quantitative easing, random walk, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, risk/return, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, secular stagnation, shareholder value, short selling, Simon Kuznets, structural adjustment programs, technological determinism, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, tontine, too big to fail, trade liberalization, value at risk, Washington Consensus, yield curve, zero-sum game

The economy is ‘self-healing’. In technical terms, ‘the implication of real-business-cycle models, in their strongest form, is that observed aggregate output movements represent the time-varying Pareto optimum’.67 The New Keynesians preserved the basic framework of the New Classical RBC/DSGE models, but added ‘market frictions’, like monopolistic competition and nominal rigidities, to make the models more applicable to the real world.68 A pp e n di x 7.3: T h e c e n t r a l b a n k r e ac t ion f u nc t ion Pre-crash central bank policy combined New Classical and New Keynesian models. In New Keynesian models, monetary policy still plays a stabilizing role, ‘imperfections’ recreating a space between the short- and long-run.

Valuation: Measuring and Managing the Value of Companies by Tim Koller, McKinsey, Company Inc., Marc Goedhart, David Wessels, Barbara Schwimmer, Franziska Manoury

accelerated depreciation, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, air freight, ASML, barriers to entry, Basel III, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, book value, BRICs, business climate, business cycle, business process, capital asset pricing model, capital controls, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, commoditize, compound rate of return, conceptual framework, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, currency risk, discounted cash flows, distributed generation, diversified portfolio, Dutch auction, energy security, equity premium, equity risk premium, financial engineering, fixed income, index fund, intangible asset, iterative process, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, market friction, Myron Scholes, negative equity, new economy, p-value, performance metric, Ponzi scheme, price anchoring, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, risk free rate, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, six sigma, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, stocks for the long run, survivorship bias, technology bubble, time value of money, too big to fail, transaction costs, transfer pricing, two and twenty, value at risk, yield curve, zero-coupon bond

Self-selection is the tendency of companies to split their stocks into lower denominations because of a prolonged rise in their share price, as shown in Exhibit 5.16. As a result, one should expect any sample of companies that 40 R. D. Boehme and B. R. Danielsen report over 6,000 stock splits between 1950 and 2000: “Stock-Split Post-Announcement Returns: Underreaction or Market Friction?” Financial Review 42 (2007): 485–506. D. Ikenberry and S. Ramnath report over 3,000 stock splits between 1988 and 1998: “Underreaction to Self-Selected News Events: The Case of Stock Splits,” Review of Financial Studies 15 (2002): 489–526. 41 There is ample evidence to show that this is not the case: after a split, trading volumes typically decline, and brokerage fees and bid-ask spreads increase, indicating lower liquidity, if anything.

Principles of Corporate Finance by Richard A. Brealey, Stewart C. Myers, Franklin Allen

3Com Palm IPO, accelerated depreciation, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Airbus A320, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, asset-backed security, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, big-box store, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black-Scholes formula, Boeing 747, book value, break the buck, Brownian motion, business cycle, buy and hold, buy low sell high, California energy crisis, capital asset pricing model, capital controls, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, collateralized debt obligation, compound rate of return, computerized trading, conceptual framework, corporate governance, correlation coefficient, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cross-border payments, cross-subsidies, currency risk, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, Dutch auction, equity premium, equity risk premium, eurozone crisis, fear index, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, frictionless, fudge factor, German hyperinflation, implied volatility, index fund, information asymmetry, intangible asset, interest rate swap, inventory management, Iridium satellite, James Webb Space Telescope, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Larry Ellison, law of one price, linear programming, Livingstone, I presume, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, market bubble, market friction, money market fund, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, new economy, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, PalmPilot, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, price discrimination, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, QR code, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Real Time Gross Settlement, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Scaled Composites, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Skype, SpaceShipOne, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, sunk-cost fallacy, systematic bias, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Nature of the Firm, the payments system, the rule of 72, time value of money, too big to fail, transaction costs, University of East Anglia, urban renewal, VA Linux, value at risk, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, yield curve, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game, Zipcar

We recommend the easy way when repurchases are important. Note also that the second way, which works out nicely in our example, becomes much more difficult to do precisely when repurchases are irregular or unpredictable. Our example illustrates several general points. First, absent tax effects or other market frictions, today’s market capitalization and share price are not affected by how payout is split between dividends and repurchases. Second, shifting payout to repurchases reduces current dividends but produces an offsetting increase in future earnings and dividends per share. Third, when valuing cash flow per share, it is double-counting to include both the forecasted dividends per share and cash received from repurchases.