Emerging Markets and Trading Costs

To enhance our understanding of emerging markets we study a data set containing all the transaction records over a long span. The market, which was included in 1996 in the International Finance Corporation (IFC) data base roughly three years after important market reforms, operated under a dual trading system, consisting of an upstairs market for large block trades and a trading floor exchange. Transactions were recorded separately for both segments of the market. Effective spreads as well as the price impact of large block trades are examined. We test whether the costs of trading have significantly changed since the stock market microstructure reforms. We uncover prohibitively expensive trading costs which are temporary, yet last for over a year and coincide with the incoporation of the market into the IFC data base. This temporary effect is followed by transaction costs roughly equal to the pre-reforms era. The results we obtain do not support the conventional wisdom that market transparency and trading costs enhance, at least directly, the emergence of a market.
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