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Discussion Paper
Is Treasury Market Liquidity Becoming More Concentrated
In an earlier post, we showed that Treasury market liquidity appears reasonably good by historical standards. That analysis focused on the most liquid benchmark securities, largely because data availability is best for those securities. However, some studies, such as this one and this one, report that market liquidity is concentrating in the most liquid securities at the expense of the less liquid, so that looking only at the benchmark securities gives a misleading impression. In this post, I look at trading volume information reported by the Federal Reserve to test whether liquidity is ...
Report
Trading activity in the Indian government bond market
We study how the Indian government bond market functions, how it has changed over time, and what factors help explain some of its features. Looking at the primary market, we describe how underwriting obligations are allocated to primary dealers via auction and identify several significant determinants of the underwriting commission cutoff rate, including the launch of the Negotiated Dealing System-Order Matching System (NDS-OM) electronic trading platform. Turning to the secondary market, we explore the importance of benchmark bonds, the launch of NDS-OM, the growth in trading activity, and ...
Report
The Microstructure of China's Government Bond Market
Although China now has one of the largest government bond markets in the world, the market has received relatively little attention and analysis. We describe the history and structure of the market and assess its functioning. We find that trading in individual bonds was historically sparse but has increased markedly in recent years. We find also that certain announcements of macroeconomic news, such as China?s producer price index (PPI) and manufacturing purchasing managers? index (PMI), have significant effects on yields, even when such yields are measured at a daily level. Despite the ...
Discussion Paper
End‑of‑Month Activity Across the Treasury Market
In a 2024 post, we showed that interdealer trading in benchmark U.S. Treasury notes and bonds concentrates on the last trading day of the month, likely due to passive investment funds’ turn-of-month portfolio rebalancing. In this post, we extend our trading activity analysis to the full range of Treasury securities and market segments. We find that trading is even more concentrated on the last trading day of the month for other types of Treasury securities and in the dealer-to-customer segment of the market, with trading volume in off-the-run Treasuries twice as high as on other days, on ...