We devise a simple model of liquidity demand and supply to deepen the understanding of dealers’ liquidity provision in currency markets. Drawing on a globally representative data set on currency trading volumes, we show that at times when dealers' intermediation capacity is constrained the cost of liquidity provision increases disproportionately relative to dealer-intermediated volume. Thus, the otherwise strong and positive relation between liquidity costs and trading volume effectively shrinks to zero when dealers are more constrained. Using various econometric approaches, we show that this result primarily stems from a reduction in the elasticity of liquidity supply, rather than changes in liquidity demand.

Many financial markets are populated by dealers, who commit to regularly participate in the market, and non-dealers who do not commit. This market structure introduces a trade-off between competition and volatility, which we study using data on Canadian Treasury auctions. We document a consistent exit trend by dealers and increasing, but irregular participation by non-dealer hedge funds. Using a structural model, we evaluate the impact of dealer exit on hedge fund participation and its consequences on market competition and volatility. We find that hedge fund entry was partially driven by dealer exit, and that gains thanks to stronger competition associated with hedge fund entry are off-set by losses due to their irregular market participation. We propose an issuance policy that stabilizes hedge fund participation at a sufficiently high average level and achieves sizable revenue gains.

We use outages as natural experiments to study sovereign bond market functioning. When the euro area futures market goes down, trading activity on the cash market declines, liquidity evaporates, and transaction prices deviate from fundamental values. Tracing back this macrolevel market breakdown to the micro-level, we show that particularly dealers withdraw from the cash market during outages. While most of their remaining trades remain fairly priced, dealer’s capacity to intermediate trades on the cash market is reduced, forcing more clients to trade directly with each other, leading to substantial mispricing. Lastly, outages on cash trading venues barely affect the futures market, suggesting that price formation and liquidity provision is a one-way street, and outages on the US and euro area futures market barely affect each other, in stark contrast to the significant price spillovers. Our results reveal the trade-offs between a (de)centralized market structure, they support cross-asset learning models to explain the link between liquidity and arbitrage, and they demonstrate how financial intermediaries can impose important limits to arbitrage.