Three Essays on the U.S. Treasury Market

Abstract

My thesis consists of three essays on market microstructure. Focusing on the U.S. Treasury market, I investigate several interesting research questions by using twelve years of BrokerTec order books of 2-, 5-, and 10-year on-the-run U.S. Treasury notes from January 1, 2004 to December 31, 2015, and five years of BrokerTec order books of 3-, 7- and 30-year on-the-run U.S. Treasury securities from January 1, 2011 to December 31, 2015. In the U.S. Treasury market, BrokerTec is one of the two dominant electronic communication networks (ECNs). According to my calculations by using BrokerTec order books from 2011 to 2015, the average daily trading volume of BrokerTec on-the-run U.S. Treasury securities is about 134.9 billion U.S. dollars, which accounts for about 26% of that of the total U.S. Treasury primary dealer activity. To help a wider audience better understand the importance of the research questions in the following three chapters, Chapter 1 gives a brief introduction to the U.S. Treasury market.

In Chapter 2, I investigate the impact of scheduled macroeconomic news announcements on the U.S. Treasury market efficiency. To control the microstructure noise, I employ a robust method to construct market inefficiency measures. I find that the U.S. Treasury market becomes less efficient starting from five minutes before news arrivals. The finding is robust for different sample periods, macroeconomic news announcements, and market inefficiency measures. Investor heterogeneity could explain the decreased market efficiency before scheduled news announcements.

In Chapter 3, I investigate the impact of workup trading protocols on the U.S. Treasury market quality. Each transaction on the lit pool opens a workup window, during which the BrokerTec trading platform continues to receive order submissions and modifications, but only matches workup orders that have the same prices. Each workup transaction starts a new counting down of the workup clock. A workup window naturally closes either after the workup times out or when a limit order is submitted at a better price. I find that the workup trading activities decrease the market quality, in aspects of market efficiency and market liquidity.

In Chapter 4, I empirically examine the role of heterogeneity in traders’ beliefs and public information shocks on traders’ order submission decisions around news announcements in the U.S. Treasury market. I find that during both the pre-announcement period and the post-announcement period, the traders tend to submit more market orders and aggressive limit orders when the market uncertainty is high. I also find that the belief heterogeneity influences investors’ trading behavior and order submission strategies around news announcements. The role of the belief heterogeneity on order aggressiveness depends on the type of news, and the magnitude of the information shocks. The impact of market uncertainty and belief heterogeneity influences traders’ submission of both of the market orders and aggressive limit orders.

In Chapter 5, I provide a summary on the research findings in Chapter 2, Chapter 3 and Chapter 4. I also discuss the contributions of this thesis to the literature.